Subject: CHANGING MY MIND MAYBE? THOMAS FRANK (Wikipedia
link): "Millions of ordinary Americans support
Donald Trump. Here's why: When he isn’t spewing insults, the
Republican frontrunner is hammering home a powerful message about
free trade and its victims" (article
link) The Guardian, March 7, 2016
I hate to say it, but while I strongly support Senator Bernie Sanders despite any concern I may have expressed--Bernie Sanders for the April 19th, NY Democratic Party primary!!!--I am not so sure now, having read the feature article here--PLEASE see blow--about supporting former Secretary of State Clinton against Donald Trump, gross and disgusting as he certainly is. Really, I just don't know! (By the way who has the worse image, Donald Drumpf or Vladimir Putin, I wonder?) I still live in always-goes-Democratic-Party New York state, so it will not matter how I vote in November if it is between Trump and Clinton. But I am pulling back on making any suggestions for you if you live in a swing state that might go with either of the monster parties in November. That amounts to a partial change of mind on my part since February 19th and March 2nd. I just do not know. I might be even more terrified of former Secretary of State Clinton than I am of Donald Drumpf, for reasons previously stated both here (3/7) and in a number of other recent messages.
Thomas Frank is a great author, deservedly well known, as you can see for yourself if you care to look above, first line. I have read one book by him, a couple of books of his back, entitled The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation (2009, originally 2008)
Please skip this archive link for right now and come back to it before you go away. It goes to my just now finished archiving of several past messages that concern Thomas Frank, going back to August 7, 2008. They are still relevant now, seven (7) plus years later. I started the archive in 2013, so these had not yet gotten there. You will find that I combined several messages with several dates into one rather long and worthy archive post, for simplicity.
This is some of what Thomas Frank has to say starting below the middle. In the first part he takes great pains to make it clear that as an intelligent man it is totally clear to him what is wrong with the idea of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America.
Again, please take some time and review my archiving of past messages that concern Thomas Frank, going back to August 7, 2008. They are still relevant now, seven (7) plus years later. I started the archive in 2013, so these had not yet gotten there. For simplicity I have combined several messages with several dates into one archive post.
sent 8/7/08 the latest on Washington corruption
love,
Larry
I hate to say it, but while I strongly support Senator Bernie Sanders despite any concern I may have expressed--Bernie Sanders for the April 19th, NY Democratic Party primary!!!--I am not so sure now, having read the feature article here--PLEASE see blow--about supporting former Secretary of State Clinton against Donald Trump, gross and disgusting as he certainly is. Really, I just don't know! (By the way who has the worse image, Donald Drumpf or Vladimir Putin, I wonder?) I still live in always-goes-Democratic-Party New York state, so it will not matter how I vote in November if it is between Trump and Clinton. But I am pulling back on making any suggestions for you if you live in a swing state that might go with either of the monster parties in November. That amounts to a partial change of mind on my part since February 19th and March 2nd. I just do not know. I might be even more terrified of former Secretary of State Clinton than I am of Donald Drumpf, for reasons previously stated both here (3/7) and in a number of other recent messages.
Thomas Frank is a great author, deservedly well known, as you can see for yourself if you care to look above, first line. I have read one book by him, a couple of books of his back, entitled The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation (2009, originally 2008)
Please skip this archive link for right now and come back to it before you go away. It goes to my just now finished archiving of several past messages that concern Thomas Frank, going back to August 7, 2008. They are still relevant now, seven (7) plus years later. I started the archive in 2013, so these had not yet gotten there. You will find that I combined several messages with several dates into one rather long and worthy archive post, for simplicity.
This is some of what Thomas Frank has to say starting below the middle. In the first part he takes great pains to make it clear that as an intelligent man it is totally clear to him what is wrong with the idea of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America.
"....Now, I have no special reason to doubt the suspicion that Donald Trump is a racist. Either he is one, or (as the comedian John Oliver puts it) he is pretending to be one, which amounts to the same thing.Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why: When he isn’t spewing insults, the Republican frontrunner is hammering home a powerful message about free trade and its victims, by Thomas Frank, The Guardian, March 7, 2016
"But there is another way to interpret the Trump phenomenon. A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington’s free-market consensus have brought the rest of America.
"It is worth noting that Trump is making a point of assailing that Indiana air conditioning company from the video in his speeches. What this suggests is that he’s telling a tale as much about economic outrage as it is tale of racism on the march. Many of Trump’s followers are bigots, no doubt, but many more are probably excited by the prospect of a president who seems to mean it when he denounces our trade agreements and promises to bring the hammer down on the CEO that fired you and wrecked your town, unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
"Here is the most salient supporting fact: when people talk to white, working-class Trump supporters, instead of simply imagining what they might say, they find that what most concerns these people is the economy and their place in it. I am referring to a study just published by Working America, a political-action auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, which interviewed some 1,600 white working-class voters in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh in December and January.
"Support for Donald Trump, the group found, ran strong among these people, even among self-identified Democrats, but not because they are all pining for a racist in the White House. Their favorite aspect of Trump was his “attitude”, the blunt and forthright way he talks. As far as issues are concerned, “immigration” placed third among the matters such voters care about, far behind their number one concern: “good jobs / the economy”.
"'People are much more frightened than they are bigoted,' is how the findings were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America. The survey 'confirmed what we heard all the time: people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids don’t have a future' and that 'there still hasn’t been a recovery from the recession, that every family still suffers from it in one way or another.'
"Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council in Fort Wayne, puts it even more bluntly when I asked him about working-class Trump fans. 'These people aren’t racist, not any more than anybody else is,' he says of Trump supporters he knows. 'When Trump talks about trade, we think about the Clinton administration, first with Nafta and then with [Permanent Normal Trade Relations] China, and here in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged jobs.'
"'They look at that, and here’s Trump talking about trade, in a ham-handed way, but at least he’s representing emotionally. We’ve had all the political establishment standing behind every trade deal, and we endorsed some of these people, and then we’ve had to fight them to get them to represent us.'
"Now, let us stop and smell the perversity. Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people’s concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a 'creative class' that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn’t need to listen to them any longer.
"What Lewandowski and Nussbaum are saying, then, should be obvious to anyone who’s dipped a toe outside the prosperous enclaves on the two coasts. Ill-considered trade deals and generous bank bailouts and guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average people, ever – these policies have taken their toll. As Trump says, 'we have rebuilt China and yet our country is falling apart. Our infrastructure is falling apart … Our airports are, like, Third World.'
"Trump’s words articulate the populist backlash against liberalism that has been building slowly for decades and may very well occupy the White House itself, whereupon the entire world will be required to take seriously its demented ideas.
"Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed."
Again, please take some time and review my archiving of past messages that concern Thomas Frank, going back to August 7, 2008. They are still relevant now, seven (7) plus years later. I started the archive in 2013, so these had not yet gotten there. For simplicity I have combined several messages with several dates into one archive post.
sent 8/7/08 the latest on Washington corruption
love,
Larry
