They're almost certainly wrong about the medicine, but their diagnosis isn't far off: globalization has not helped them as much as it's hurt them. Cheaper goods don't make up for dying towns.
Edit: Downvoting people who actually understand Trump voters and try to vocalize their needs and perspectives just silences the voices that could be used to shape a better platform for the Democrats next time. You won't win elections by fighting a straw man invented by your echo chamber.
What I realized was that, for people who've been "left out of the benefits of the global economy", that picture makes total sense--the pie didn't grow, and in fact probably shrank for them. Thus, zero-sum thinking makes perfect rational sense. It's an accurate worldview, and anyone trumpeting "the pie will grow, you just need to give up a little more (in increased taxes or jobs shipped elsewhere)" in spite of the evidence that IT HASN'T, must be either a fool or outright lying to them.
Anyways, for the first time I felt myself understanding a little bit how these voters may feel.
Who would go for that? If it were merely about the pie shrinking, maybe that's just inevitable, and reasonable people would have to concede that it must shrink. They feel as if there is an element of fraud in the proposals that are made. Rather than miscalculation, rather than misfortune.
But, instead of focusing on spinning up solar panel production factories or cutting edge automation in automobile manufacturing or funding world class universities to reskill people in things the modern world needs, they’d rather double down on their protectionist agenda while blaming the liberals, despite it being 100% their own fault. Fucking over the liberals might make them feel smug, but the conservative position is worse, because now there isn’t the remote possibility that they can get government funding for all these “socialist agenda items”, never mind that it would actually help them.
I’m not saying you’re defending their position, but I am saying that they need to get over themselves, because that’s the only way things get better for them. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying things don’t suck for them. I’m sorry for them that life is hard, and things change. It would certainly be nice if we could just do the things we’re used to and like forever without needing to adapt. But shit changes, and being mean to trans people or whatever just isn’t going to make their lives better, it’s only going to make every one else’s worse too. We rely on each other. We have no choice not to. So instead of being antisocial, they need to grow up and join the rest of us in the society we’re trying to have.
They were a member of a club, and that club was rich and they deserved to enjoy the results of that. But then other people tricked them into letting a bunch of other people in the club, and selling off the club's assets at the same time, until their share was diluted to nothing. Then the same people who pulled this trick come to them and say "you have nothing of value, you deserve to starve". And some of those people pretend to be the other side "just implement marxism, so you can have your fair share of nearly nothing".
>or funding world class universities to reskill people in things the modern world needs,
Those universities have nothing to do with that. Go talk to those people, they don't want to "become vocational schools". Not when there's so much grift money to be made bringing in foreigners on student visas.
>but I am saying that they need to get over themselves, because that’s the only way things get better for them.
Nothing gets better from here on out. This is terminal decline, and the two (or more factions) who are at war here couldn't even stop it if they cooperated for some reason.
>I’m sorry for them that life is hard,
Not really. But even if you could shed a genuine tear for them, I think it's going to be short-lived when you discover that you're in much the same boat as they.
>and join the rest of us in the society we’re trying to have.
The society you're trying to have is dying. The first rule of societies is that they absolutely must make more generations of people who will then (and soon) become that society. The society you're trying to have thought you could all upload your brains into robot bodies or something and forgot that. And now it's dying, and nothing can save it. These people aren't trying to "be mean to trans people", they were hoping the kindergarten teacher wouldn't groom them into becoming infertile. They were hoping for grandchildren, against all odds.
Manufacturing output in the US is at an all-time high:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...
Though it's (a) smaller share of GDP compared to the 'good old days' of the 1950-60s, and (b) does not need as many workers because of automation. This is true in a lot of industries: various seaports have never imported/exports more goods, but have fewer dockworkers than decades ago because of containerization and giant cranes.
Though one problem is of 'concentrated loss': if a town/area was dependent on one factory (or industry), then it could be especially heavily hit because of that single point of failure.
And so… they vote for the cheaper goods and killing their towns more?
> the voices that could be used to shape a better platform for the Democrats next time.
The Democratic platform has been around providing succour and training to rural areas for several election cycles, Clinton’s campaign included 30 billions in infrastructure, training, and redevelopment, as well as healthcare and pension safeguard for coal counties.
So, how is inflation and egg price doing now when bad democrats lost?
Democrats have had 4 presidents in office in the last 10 administrations (11 if you count the current one), accounting for 24 of the past 56 years.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/joe-biden-tells-coal-miners-15210...
(I am not claiming that their opponents have any better solutions.)
The economic problems are that once a location reliant on extractive industries gets too expensive (and / or gets automated leading to orders of magnitude cuts to the necessary workforce) it's not coming back, the companies either fold or leave. Europe has coal countries which folded a century ago. Once your coal is too far to be cheaply extractible, even if new tech made extracting it viable once again it almost certainly would not need anywhere near the same level of crewing. And reactivating an old mine is probably not worth the cost over upgrading mines which are still active.
So your only "fixes" are to flee the area or move to a new industry. And to do the latter, you need a way to kickstart the change. That's the goal of federal grants.
The recovery of extractive areas is difficult, and may not even be possible if too dependent. And it certainly does not happen by clinging to the extractive industry which left you behind.
It doesn't actually matter in this case who is right—as I said, they're wrong about the medicine—what matters is who understands the human beings who vote better. And Trump understood these people better than any member of the establishment in either party, which is why he was able to hijack one and defeat the other.
Inventing stories about how half the country just wants the other half to hurt won't help win the midterms and the next presidency. We have to get past that and actually look at what Trump voters truly believe, then speak to them as real people, not strawmen.
Being a leader means understanding the reality of a situation, developing a strategy, and understanding where people are so you can get them on board and all work together to improve things.
It does not mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power for yourself while making their situation even worse.
It does mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power to do whatever you wanted to do. Their prejudices are the real part of reality.
Politicians who forget this fact get owned.
So if you want to be a leader, you have to start by understanding people and, yes, pandering to them. There's a reason why too many of our powerful politicians have been essentially indistinguishable from sociopaths.
Is that a position you hold consistently? Is there anything you believe that you wouldn’t be swayed on when presented evidence to the contrary of your belief?
I ask, because there is an awful lot of mainstream Republican and (here’s the controversial bit) Democrat thought that simply has no basis in reality.
Training for what? What if our population of working age people is far larger than our economy's ability to absorb whatever sort of service worker you imagine they should be training to become? Given a fixed total population, there's only room for x masseuses or y graphic artists. If we have n unemployed people needing training, and that number is higher than x and y combined (for any sort of x and y), telling them to retrain doesn't solve their problem. Some are going to lose out. The truth of the matter is that by offshoring manufacturing, we created an economy where there is a surplus of ultimately unemployable people.
A message of training isn't just bullshit, it's transparent bullshit. Most people have an intuition that this is the case, after all. As for midterms, both the Republican and Democratic parties have a different strategy. They will simply import voters who will vote for them. H1Bs for the GOP, and the remainder of the naturalization pipeline for the Ds. It's slow, but they're willing to put in the longterm effort.
The tough nut to crack is that it is impossible to talk with red tribe voters about any of this! You can sit there and listen, of course. But as soon as you say anything that still addresses their frustration and pain, but yet diverges from their overly-simplistic party chorus, you're now part of the "other" that is eagerly responsible for their problems and will just be reflexively argued with.
And the situation has gotten so bad that lighter touch individual-freedom-respecting solutions (that they could possibly agree with in theory) aren't likely to even work now. For example twenty years ago, stopping the profligate government spending and handouts to banks could have stopped rural economies from continuing to get hollowed out. Allowing deflation in consumer goods would have allowed main street to experience some of the gains from offshoring. Re-setting the definition of full time employment to 40 hours per household per week would have slowed down the financial grindstone.
Instead these days we're basically down to direct government stimulus to create new jobs - directly at odds with the medicine they think they need. Or even worse, completely uninspiring answers like UBI.
When people do build factories, which they still do, they build them in or around the cities, not in the country, despite having to pay more for land, labor, and regulatory compliance. If they do locate in the country, they choose a town that has a university and a hospital.
There are committed bigots in the Republican voter base. They’re suburban and rural-rich.
The rural poor Republican voters largely are, at least hypothetically (if you can get through their media bubbles) reachable by the right economic message. They’re not in it for the racism or what have you. That’s the suburban republicans.
I can't ever understand why they have so much hate and bile in them? I'm guessing its just fear of losing what they do have? I don't really know.
This was beautifully expressed in the West Virginia teachers strike a few years back: https://youtu.be/JEjU-X57Wrc?t=4313
The liberal elites are paying for their inability to keep the societal compact somewhat alive. If too many people don't have jobs and can't find a dentist, they will start a "voter disobedience".
Of course the second order effects will be huge, but it is, in a sense, necessary development. A democratic country has to be able to keep a majority of its people reasonably satisfied and well-off.
FYI I don't believe in "THE REASON" or "THE CAUSE" and I am wary of people who reduce complex issues such as voting patterns to one single root cause, but to deny that economic hardship is a significant factor in anti-system vote seems to be wishful thinking to me.
Show me a relatively rich neighbourhood or voting district (say, over 130 per cent of average national GDP) with above average anti-system vote share, anywhere in Europe. I don't think you will find it. People who have a lot to lose don't rock the boat.
Also your economic story doesn't hold water. The Biden administration successfully placed tons of factories all over the country with tax incentives for clean energy, but those factories could never trumpet what they were doing because hate for Democrats and for Biden and for clean energy is stronger than any desire for jobs. Similarly the destruction of the CHIPS act and its unpopularity in rural areas also shows that the economic opportunity aspect is just an excuse for the cultural hate that has been worked up.
The best way to understand a Trump supporter that I have come to is a person that hates Democrats more than anything, and will do anything possible to bully them, including the economic destruction of the country. I have a lot of family like this, and for years I thought they were just joking or exaggerating about their hate, but the past year has shown me that they were earnest. It's not the 1990s anymore, this is a visceral culture war above all else.
For no reason. Trans people aren't doing anything but trying to live their lives but the concept of being trans disrupts their view of the world. People fear what they don't understand and because they don't understand the real reasons for their struggles, everything they don't understand can be conflated by a confident liar saying they are related.
Possibly the most succinct summary has been sitting in pop culture for a quarter century but how it could apply to real life never clicked with most people: "Fear is the path to the dark side"
Nothing has changed here. It's doesn't matter what they've claimed they're doing, there are still no jobs here and working class Americans feel abandoned.
The vast majority of Trump voters around here voted for him because of the economy. The trans stuff was seen as evidence that the Democrats were so wrapped up in first world problems held by a tiny minority that they didn't even notice that the majority of the country was actively struggling to make ends meet. It's not about the trans people, it's about the narrative that Trump shaped about how that related to these people's economic lives.
All of this is made much worse by social media too, which fans the flames hotter than it ever could have been before.
I actually saw a couple people saying that they've received a check from Trump during Covid, and mentioned that as a clear reason to vote for him. I thought it sounded dumb when I saw that he insisted on having his name on the stimulus checks, but apparently it worked. I also saw some people, southern women and big city black men, saying that they definitely didn't want a female president. That was probably part of why Hillary lost, and making the same play this time wasn't very wise from the democrats, although I would probably blame Biden for not dropping out earlier and leaving them very little choice.
People don't realize the economy isn't just a switch with good and bad
But they haven't, they're just completely uninformed about what they're getting. If you think ANY of the rural farming communities could continue to exist without significant federal subsidies, you're crazy.
Ask a farmer whether globalization has helped him or not the next time China retaliates to a tarriff by refusing to import any US soybeans and you'll quickly discover that it has absolutely helped them.
Globalization is less the cause of their issue, it's deregulation. Consolidation of manufacturing has killed plants in those small towns. Consolidation of groceries[1] has made it impossible for small-town grocery stores to survive on their own. Both can be traced back to Reaganomics.
Are the Democrats at fault for not attempting to reverse any of that? Absolutely, but the answer isn't: we need someone who wants even more consolidation and to kill all international relations.
But I got my face punched multiple times for not preforming masculinity in a way that they found acceptable or for standing up for someone smaller and weaker.
As I mentioned in another thread, the Republicans switched from "the immigrants are stealing your jobs" to "the immigrants are stealing your cats."
With what their opponents had? They didn't even need one.
They want the 70s-80s economy back, but they don't want to support unions.
They think they deserve to receive government benefits. But others are moochers, and they don't deserve it.
They think Trump is deporting criminal / drug cartel illegal immigrants.
My state is red (State houses & governor have been conservatives for the last 30 years). Yet they blame all the issues on democrates. When my state signed the carry law, they thought Biden was the one who signed the law.
If you are in the deep trump territory, listen to conservative/religious radio stations. You will know how much hate they are spreading against liberal, trans, gays, and immigrants.
You have to distinguish between the rhetoric being spread to hijack the economic woes and the actual root of the problem. All that stuff is designed to give people an outlet for their very real economic frustrations. It's not deep seated (yet), it's a tool to exploit them. The only reason why it's working is because these people have been ignored for too long by the establishment in both parties, and it's not too late to respond and adapt.
The closest is his anti immigrant rhetoric but my guess is that this will largely hurt farmers (although maybe they know better than I do).
How is any of this helping fly over country?
Living in Trump country doesn’t give you any extra credibility. I also live in “Trump Country” and say that the real reason is because they’re all goofs that fell into a personality cult due to the decline of US education and this country’s obsession with celebrity. Who is correct?
Save the downvote victim complex for Reddit.
We’ve been falling over ourselves trying to understand these poor misunderstood Trump voters for nearly 10 years now. We’ve all heard these rationalizations many times before.
But they never ever deliver any real solution. Never. What trump solved in first term? No wall, he was joke of the world for that. No middle east peace - fuck, he made the invasion to Israel by giving Jerusalem official israeli status. Palestinians lost all hope at that point (I know its way more complex than that, I know, but this was the trigger point to go full mental like a cornered animal). Afghanistan withdrawal? Thats his contracts with taliban which made US look so weak they were shooting ducks as you guys and rest of west literally ran away for your life.
To make any successful long term massive changes, you need a steady leadership. trump is the opposite due to his mental & childhood issues, heck he is the epitome of instability. And so he drags whole world into same instability, changing global markets from bullish to bearish within a week, losing literally all friends and allies, globally. No, puttin' ain't your friend and never will be, he is a murderous sociopathic p.o.s. till his last breath.
If simpler folks refuse to see all this and much more and connect those few dots, your idea of babysitting them and hald-holding in ever changing environment is laughable. Even in Europe you guys consider semi-communist we don't do that, we can't do that, its idiotic. This problem is not unique to US in any way and solution ain't what he wants to do. But its so nice to hear all that crap, "I will fix your woes", "the others are to blame for all your issues" and so on. Full on emotions, 0 rationality. Folks, even societies work like that, but get ready China will overtake you sooner than you would like.
I kept thinking he is just a russian agent brainwashed in 80s during his visit to moscow (maybe deep hypnosis or something else), but it seems more and more he is doing massive favors to China actually, since russia is already insignificant globally. I don't mean some pesky tariffs, I mean whole world will realign around China, and he is giving it all to them for free. Bravo.
* Abolish democracy (only works preemptively, abolishing democracy while they're in charge would obviously not work).
* Wait for them to die and hope they don't teach what they know to a successor.
* Learn from them and speak to some fraction of their core even more persuasively than they do.
You don't defeat a populist by simple virtue of being right.
The reason I ask is that here in Romania the issue is completly fabircated by the social media and amplified by the algorithm. What I mean there was not a single law pro LGBTQ passed in Romania, the educational system is not teaching children about LGBTQ, there are no changes in schools or other places to unixes bathrooms, no forced or assisted transitioning programs.
It is just media with conspiracies like the COVID vaccines makes you gay, 5G makes you gay, Bruxelles wants to make your children gay, Soros wants to make the children gay. There are also staged video with transexuals making a circus and shared on TikTok. So now we have a lot of idiots that actually thinks that we need to surrender to Putin so he can kill the traitors and the gays.
You state "the big cities and the coasts might be better off, but the middle of the country wants to go back to when they had opportunities and jobs for working class Americans. ...globalization has not helped them as much as it's hurt them. Cheaper goods don't make up for dying towns."
I 100% agree with that. But I think that many folks are so enthralled with Trump because he was the first politician to really acknowledge this simmering rage, give it legitimacy, and say that it's all those woke, city-dwelling liberals fault. The GP comment says "The best explanation I've heard is that this (almost) half of the US population doesn't care if it hurts a bit, as long as it hurts the other half of the US population more", but that fits perfectly in with your explanation as well. A lot of Trump supporters are pissed as hell about the hollowing out of their communities, and they're looking to bring retribution for those they blame for their downfall (or the ones Trump has convinced them are responsible for their downfall). Heck, Trump even said it loudly and proudly, "I am your retribution."
It doesn't matter that Republicans are slightly more to blame then Democrats in the thinning out of rural places - the folks who live there, IMO, see both parties as the same thing.
They remember how their towns were when they were young, they had a bustling locally owned and operated main street full of commercial activity, they also often had a factory, or mill which provided good jobs too.
Some of the parallel commenters here only think rural = farming, and thats not true. If you look at the Carolinas for example, there were textile and lumber mills - farming there is still more or less as healthy as its every been - but all of those other sources of employment which brought money in from outside of the community are gone.
This story repeats itself in a bunch of places, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Michigan, and across the greater west too.
This rot started well before Reagan though - it's something I've called "the 1971 problem". If you go on a road trip across rural America, you'll rarely see a locally funded building (aka, not a chain store), built after 1971-3 - with the notable exception to this being places with a military base, college, or some other government facility - and I think the causes are multiple here, post vietnam drawdown of forces, détente, the 1973 oil crisis, stagflation, the Nixon shock, then later the so-called peace dividend after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war.
Globalization thru the 80's-90's just made all of these issues worse, and hollowed out manufacturing too - now all of this this effected cities too, to some extent, but as you mention, cities got benefits of globalization - more information economy jobs, greater wealth flowing in from the financialization of everything, which while didnt replace the jobs lost in manufacturing, did replace the wealth generated by it. (there are even more things I've not really touched on - like the steady decrease in local ownership of businesses, and the corresponding civic rot that kicks in when this happens)
There is another issue I also want to touch on here - "jobs for regular people" - for a significant portion of the population, the best job they can hope for is a decent factory job, a job in the trades - or more likely today, a not so great service job. One of the reasons I want to onshore manufacturing is that we need those higher quality jobs to ensure the benefits of our economy are shared more broadly.
I'm a proponent of tariffs as a way to solve this - not what Trump is doing which are penalty tariffs - but what I've called cost adjustment tariffs - tariffs that adjust the price of imported manufactured goods to the same level as if they were made here, where you price in labor differences overall regulatory burden, environmental and climate rules, and other factors - on a fundamental level, I feel it is immoral to export all the externalities from manufacturing to another country (pollution being the primary one I'm thinking of).
While tariffs, even at some low level may result in slower GDP growth. People cannot eat or pay their rent with GDP - a more ideal answer (one I support) is UBI, but UBI doesn't appear to politically possible - and there is also value in being able to do work where you can see the fruits of your labor (both in the physical good you've made - and the pay check you get at the end of the week), for good or for bad, it gives you self worth and a feeling of purpose too.
So I get why rural voters vote for Trump, and its because my side has failed to understand the economic pain that anyplace that isn't a tier 1/2/3 city has experienced over the last 50 years - and what their needs are for the future. In the end, I think Trump will fail them, and probably make everything else worse - but he's the horse that the American people who could be bothered to show up to vote picked (I'll note much to my consternation, that 3m less people voted in 2024 vs 2020).
I wonder how much of that is due to the media and the polls claiming that Kamala had this in the bag? The same way that they claimed Hillary had it in the bag? This would cause people to stay home no?
Also there have been reports of accelerated efforts to disenfranchise voters by challenging their registration and not telling them until election day when they go to vote. A combination of these two things could have swung the election.
Yes, and they're very aware that Trump is not a Republican in the traditional sense. It doesn't matter to them which banner he hijacked, they know he's different.
Some are just blind partisans, otherwise those places wouldn't have been voting for team red for the last 35 years or so.
There is also the paradox of the low information voter too, which seemed to have broken for Trump 2:1 - that does concern me some.
Trump also has a huge benefit with low information voters, he spews noise all the time which the news media covers with baited breath.
I call it the "Trump says alot of things" problem - it allowed people to paint whatever they wanted him to be onto him by essentially cherry picking the various things he's said to make up their own collage view of whatever they wanted him to be.
There isn’t a “progress” switch to turn on. The current state of the Rust Belt isn’t because they are full of knuckle dragging idiots inferior to the coasts. It’s because they were dealt the economic equivalent of a traumatic brain injury, and have spent decades trying to recover. Meanwhile, the areas of the country that inflicted this injury on them are now trying to convince everyone that it was their own fault.
I’m as disgusted by Trump as anyone, and would never vote for him. But I am from the Rust Belt and absolutely sympathize with the anger that would make someone want to burn the system down.
America decided in the 1970s to liquidate its interior and its manufacturing base to make Wall Street rich from the labor arbitrage trade, and did so with the full throated support of both parties.
I live in the outer suburbs of a middle American city. The idea that all Trump supporters are cult members is vastly overblown. There is some of that, but much of his support is exasperation. Rural and working class Americans have nothing to lose and nowhere to go but down. The choice is to vote for Trump or keep watching everyone commit suicide with fentanyl. They know Trump might be full of shit or might not have any real solutions, but they also know Democrats and mainstream Republicans will continue to sell them out.
It's also important to understand that for the most part working class and small town Americans don't want welfare, which is the only thing the Democratic Party (possibly, maybe) offers them. They want jobs. They want to feel useful, to do useful things. Unless you are disabled, accepting welfare is disgraceful. I remember my mom (a lifelong Democrat BTW who hates Trump) feeling humiliated to use food stamps for a brief period when I was a kid. "These are for people who really need them. I don't need them." She worked as hard as she could to get off them. Americans want to do things.
MAGA is as much anti-traditional-Republican as it is anti-Democrat. In fact I know a few Trump voters whose hatred for the likes of Bush II and the Cheneys is greater than for Democrats. It's a third political party that has taken over the corpse of the Republican party that Bush II destroyed.
I didn't vote for Trump because I don't think he actually cares either, and I loathe the man in general. I also have two daughters, and his MAGA movement is full of people who cheer for pro-rape influencers like Andrew Tate or want to LARP the Handmaid's Tale. I can't vote for a movement that is openly allied with such people. Their performative scapegoating of LGBTQ people is gross too, and then there's the crazy autocrat ideologies lurking at the margins. Even if MAGA has some policy points I agree with, the movement is just too intellectually batty and personally disgusting to support.
I see nobody on the US political stage that I actually like. I voted for Harris as a "holding pattern" vote in the hope that something better will appear in the future. It's better to stay with the bad option than to go for obviously worse options. If you look around the world "just shaking things up" with nothing better waiting in the wings usually results in a bad outcome. Successful major political shifts or revolutions require a superior alternative with better ideas.
They had a different reaction to price increases under Biden because those were not resulting from pro-American-worker trade policies, or at least were not perceived as such. In reality Biden was doing some things to try to repatriate manufacturing, but these policies were badly communicated if they were telegraphed at all, and they were not enough.
Constantly assuming these people are all just stupid isn't winning back any votes. To be fair: Republicans and MAGA spend a lot of time attacking straw man Democrats and liberals too.
BTW -- I see what they're thinking, but I suspect a lot of repatriated manufacturing will be so heavily automated it will not result in the mass employment gains they're hoping for.
Which is it? I mean, I know it's "nothing left to lose" but how can "nowhere to go but down" fit in to that?
Except, that's the exact same outcome you get even if you vote for Trump, unless there's something I'm not seeing?
I think you are correct.
Trump promised change and had "concepts of a plan".
Democrats promised more of the same, and then realized that that was unpopular and then threw together a plan that they said would work.
The reality now is that Trump's promised change may or may not help those voters economically, but the accompanying geopolitical disruptions may be worse.
The way I look at Trump/MAGA is they took over an ineffective, sclerotic Republican party that spent 40 years talking about “family values” while selling off the productive base of the country to globalization and letting rural America rot. The tea-party movement of the late aughts was their last chance to avoid being decapitated. They failed. The Republican party has been hollowed out and is simply not the same entity it was 10 years ago. It has been taken over by a very angry insurgent force.
As I see, the Democrat Party is where the Republicans were in 08/09. They have, perhaps, a few more years of whatever it is they are doing before they similarly get taken over.
Best case scenario: we end up with a new political party (or two) that represent the more sane interests of the old guard and of the population as a whole. Worst case scenario: we end up with two absolutely insane zombie versions of our two legacy political parties fighting for control of the nation.
At least we don’t have more guns than people and a bunch of nukes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I understand your perspective, but I don't think that explains most of Trump's actions. The (very valid!) critique of globalist profiteering you shared has been boiled down into something beyond economics and into tribalism.
I blame decades of right-wing media dominance on cable TV and rural radio.
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