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see link….The link between economic anxiety and rightwing nationalism can be overdone. The easy narrative of a populist revolt has an appealing simplicity, but Clinton won votes from more than half of the people who earn less than $50,000; the rich voted for Trump. He won the electoral college and lost the popular vote. Thanks to the lowest turnout in 20 years, Trump won a lower percentage of the eligible vote than John Kerry, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Gerald Ford – and they all lost. He got the same proportion of the white vote as Romney in 2012 and Bush in 2004 and only a little more than McCain in 2008. He may have led the charge to the right but comparatively few marched with him.
Nor is such a link inevitable. In several countries across Europe – from Greece to Britain – a populist left response has emerged to this same crisis. In the US Bernie Sanders….”
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…People need something to change. “The [Democratic party says] ‘Let’s just do the things we’ve always done and have incremental change’.” says Dave Ring, who runs the Downtown Farm Stand, an organic food store and deli. “So they’re very, very happy with incremental change. And the rest of the public is out here like: ‘We don’t have time for incremental change.’”
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…. “They understand the trade issue,” said Ring, who voted for Sanders in the primary and then Clinton. “People know what killed their jobs and that was Nafta. And not only did it kill our jobs here but it exploited people elsewhere, and I think people are starting to understand how multinational corporations work. They move the jobs where there’s people they can exploit.”….“…But Trump’s victory cannot be explained by racism alone – and the efforts to understand race and class separately result in one misunderstanding them both entirely. Indeed, to get to the bottom of Trump’s appeal we will have to go beyond any monocausal interpretation of these results and adopt a more intersectional approach, one that takes into account the fractious way a constellation of identities collide and align.
People are, of course, many things – male, white, straight, rural, college-educated and so on – and just one thing: themselves. It is that whole person, not a segment of it, that goes to the polls and that we need to understand. Hillary Clinton won women – but Trump won white women and older women…”
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…..Older people voted for Trump and younger for Clinton, although young white men went to Trump. In another sign of the widening divide over education – also visible in the Brexit vote – college graduates were for Clinton, those who did not attend or finish for Trump. An even starker partisan divide than gender or age was visible in the split between the rural and the urban vote….”..
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…..You can pin it on the Russians, WikiLeaks, the FBI, the media, third parties, and they all played a role. But sooner or later moderate liberals are going to have to own the consequences of their politics. In this period of despair and volatility, their offer of milquetoast, market-led managerialism is not a winning formula. For a political camp that boasts of its pragmatic electability, it has quite simply failed to adapt.Carefully scripted but complacently framed, the Clinton campaign emerged from a centrist political tradition at a moment where there is no centre, offering market-based solutions at a time when Clinton’s own base has begun to see the free market as part of the problem….
… In short, economic injustice and class alienation are as much the reason why Clinton lost as why Trump won. He stoked his base’s fears; she failed to give her base hope.
Read this series from the beginning“People look around Muncie and think, ‘What has capitalism done for the working man?’” says Dave Ring, the Downtown Food Stand owner who voted for Sanders and then Clinton. “Well, it’s taken our jobs and ruined our infrastructure and increased our healthcare prices so they’re unaffordable. If your job is good and you have good healthcare and you have retirement, then you don’t understand. That’s a very small group of people. And it happens to be the group of people who are in power.”
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….Trump did not introduce racism to the modern Republican party. He simply refused to observe institutional etiquette.For half a century, Republicans had relied on Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, which deployed a coded racial message that could bind together a formidable coalition of southern states and suburban white voters. “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,” Nixon told his chief-of-staff Bob Haldeman. “The key is to devise a system that recognises that while not appearing to.”
Trump had no problem “appearing to”, although he focused his bigotry on Latinos and Muslims more than African-Americans. Some people voted for him because of this rhetoric, while others voted for him because it didn’t put them off. The Republican party establishment was terrified by it. Even with less inflammatory rhetoric, the party had been struggling to win the White House….see link
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