>>11381366
After Trump won in 2016, there was a big debate about what explained support for the president. It was soon framed as cultural grievances versus economic grievances. What do you think of that framing, and how do you explain the rise of the president?
It was, in part, common to the Western world, not just the United States. It was same forces that voted for Brexit, that explained the surprising results in the Australian election as well as some push back in Canada. People who are on the coastal peripheries that had skills or were part of a professional class plugged into global markets — insurance, finance, media, academia, law, high tech — who made enormous amounts of money were exempt from the consequences of their own ideology. So they told people in the interior, whether it was on climate change, identity politics, or on immigration, this is what you’re going to do, and you’re the losers, you didn’t understand the economy. We can Xerox your muscular labour and outsource your fabrication or your farming or whatever. It’s cheaper somewhere else and you’re expendable.
Here in the United States, they became the deplorables, irredeemables, clingers, dregs, the people that Peter Struck in his text called the smelly ones at Walmart. Whatever they were, that group felt that they had done nothing wrong, that they were not racist, and that you had to give a second look at globalisation. They thought that while it was nice that people had eyeglasses in the Amazon, and that you can buy cheap stuff at Target or Walmart, there was a downside to the disruption in traditional life and to marginalisation of nationalism and borders, of a distinct culture and tradition, iconoclasm, all that stuff. They didn’t like it.
And Donald Trump went one step further than other politicians. He looked at the peculiarities of the American electoral system and said, you know, these people are in states that decide the election, and they have not been voting for either Democrat or Republican, they’ve been sitting out or they’re unhappy Republicans or they’re turned off Democrats, but I’m going to get four to six million of them to turnout in Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina. And he did. Now the question is, can he do it again?