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posted by n1 on Monday November 21 2016, @10:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the post-labor-economics dept.

Pundits will debate the wellsprings of Donald Trump's election triumph for years. Right now, cultural explanations are in the lead. Multiple researchers and journalists are stressing the role of "racial resentments" and xenophobia as the deepest sources of Trump's appeal. And such explanations cannot be dismissed.

But the decades-long decline of U.S. manufacturing employment and the highly automated nature of the sector's recent revitalization should also be high on the list of explanations. The former is an unmistakable source of the working class rage that helped get Trump elected. The latter is the main reason Trump won't be able to "make America great again" by bringing back production jobs.

The Rust Belt epicenter of the Trump electoral map says a lot about its emotional origins, but so do the facts of employment and productivity in U.S. manufacturing industries. The collapse of labor-intensive commodity manufacturing in recent decades and the expansion in this decade of super-productive advanced manufacturing have left millions of working-class white people feeling abandoned, irrelevant, and angry.

To see this, one has only to look at the stark trend lines of the production data, which show a massive 30-year decline of employment beginning in 1980. That trend led to the liquidation of more than a third of U.S. manufacturing positions. Employment in the sector plunged from 18.9 million jobs to 12.2 million.

[...] In fact, the total inflation-adjusted output of the U.S. manufacturing sector is now higher than it has ever been. That's true even as the sector's employment is growing only slowly, and remains near the lowest it's been. These diverging lines—which reflect the sector's improved productivity—highlight a huge problem with Trump's promises to help workers by reshoring millions of manufacturing jobs. America is already producing a lot. And in any event, the return of more manufacturing won't bring back many jobs because the labor is increasingly being done by robots.


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  • (Score: 3, Offtopic) by VLM on Monday November 21 2016, @02:07PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 21 2016, @02:07PM (#430508)

    Let me enumerate some reasons why the democrats recently miserably lost.

    Democratic strategist: I know, we can get white people to vote for us if we denigrate them enough :

    "racial resentments"

    xenophobia

    Rust Belt

    abandoned, irrelevant, and angry

    In addition to deplorables, racists, all the usual racist stuff that they pumped out this election cycle.

    Democratic strategist: Ya know, Hillary lost because she didn't label white people as racist bigots enough times. Maybe if we double down next time and have the 2020 democrat nominee exclusively refer to whites as "honky cracker ass motherfuckers" then, and only then, will the whites finally start voting for us.

    And that's how Trump WILL get re-elected in 2020. I mean seriously, that's how dumb those people are. There's no point in trying to gain votes by higher level academic reasoning when the message is presented in the form of disgust, "die whitey die".

    OK so I'm red pilled, so maybe my reasoning doesn't matter, but my wife is pretty much normie although she laughs at the memes I send her, and she wouldn't vote for Hillary, and her problem was NOT that Hillary didn't insult her enough. There's probably some moron out there right now, pondering if only Hillary had called my wife a racist one more time, they could have won our state. It don't work like that. The Democrats are clueless and I love it that way.

    Meanwhile talking to the normies at work, they're waking up to being falsely accused, and if they're gonna be punished for wearing white sheets, well ... may as well come to the party and have fun around the bonfire. So I'd like to thank the Democrats for that.

    I haven't seen the Democratic party so angry since the Republicans freed all their slaves back in 1865. The god emperor truly is glorious.

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  • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday November 21 2016, @02:58PM

    by butthurt (6141) on Monday November 21 2016, @02:58PM (#430538) Journal

    [...] if they're gonna be punished for wearing white sheets, well ... may as well come to the party and have fun around the bonfire.

    You allude to the Ku Klux Klan. David Duke, a former leader of it, wrote:

    This is one of the most exciting nights of my life -> make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump!

    -- https://twitter.com/DrDavidDuke/status/796249464826687488 [twitter.com]

    Mr. Trump was asked about having Mr. Duke's support:

    Bloomberg’s John Heilemann: “How do you feel about the David Duke quasi-endorsement?”

    Trump: “I don’t need his endorsement; I certainly wouldn’t want his endorsement. I don’t need anyone’s endorsement.”

    Heilemann: “Would you repudiate David Duke?”

    Trump: “Sure, I would do that, if it made you feel better. I don’t know anything about him. Somebody told me yesterday, whoever he is, he did endorse me. Actually I don’t think it was an endorsement. He said I was absolutely the best of all of the candidates.”

    -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/01/donald-trump-and-david-duke-for-the-record/ [washingtonpost.com]

    A KKK chapter in North Carolina will be marching to celebrate Trump's election:

    Within 48 hours of the Trump win, the Loyal White Knights of Pelham posted plans on the group’s website for a celebratory parade on Dec. 3, though no time or location has been listed. “Victory Klavalkade Klan Parade Dec. 3rd 2016 North Carolina,” is all the site mentions about the event. “Trump = Trump’s Race United My People.”

    --
    http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article116062103.html [newsobserver.com]

    "racial resentments"

    xenophobia

    Are those not euphemistic enough? The FBI has used the term "domestic terrorism" in relation to certain KKK activities:

    Domestic terrorism also remained a key concern, and in April 1997, Dallas agents arrested four members of the True Knights of the Ku Klux Klan for conspiracy to commit robbery and to blow up a natural gas processing plant.

    -- https://web.archive.org/web/20110502062533/http://www.fbi.gov/dallas/history [archive.org]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @03:26PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @03:26PM (#430560)

      Imagine that! People would rather be associated with the KKK than deal with the left anymore.

      That's how bad you've become.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 21 2016, @09:21PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 21 2016, @09:21PM (#430841)

      Um... OK. So am I supposed to vote Democrat now? If so, I'm not really feeling it.. Call me a racist a couple more times, maybe it kicks in suddenly? Nope still feeling like voting for the God Emperor again.

      Making things even weirder, everyone in the alt right knows that whatever the ancient history of the Klan, absolutely all of them in 2016 are FBI or other agency officers. There's like two good ole boys and they're surrounded at every meeting by like 50 officers all wearing so many wires and microphones that magnetic compasses must spin around in circles for a mile and they're all trying to entrap the two good ole boys to get those prosecution headlines.

      Then again the FBI isn't on the D party "most loved list" right now so I'm surprised its not insinuated that they're at the klan meeting for mere after work socialization. Joe, is that you from the office? Oh yeah Bill, thats me, nice sheet by the say, Susan sure can iron a sheet, but I'm just here for the socializing, you know, not professionally, BTW you recording? Oh, well then. Yeah that must be a very awkward conversation right there.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @01:01AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @01:01AM (#430959)

      http://21stcenturywire.com/2016/11/21/hillary-clintons-kkk-smear-against-trump-was-democrat-strategy/ [21stcenturywire.com]

      Low IQ liars project:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]

      The Democrats were the ones lynching people, while the Republican fought for equality under the law. After the 1960s Civil Rights movement, Democrats switched to vote farming. Removing productive careers from minorities (prevailing wage, minimum wage, excessive regulation) and disempowering minorities with envy politics and welfare. They switched from being slaveholders to cultural enslavement.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weqQR-NnnIs [youtube.com]

      • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:07AM

        by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:07AM (#430983) Journal

        Low IQ liars project

        Which part of what I wrote was a lie?

        Democrats switched [...]

        The Republican Party changed:

        In American politics, southern strategy refers to methods the Republican Party used to gain political support in the South by appealing to the racism against African Americans harbored by many southern white voters.

        [...] Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South to the Republican Party that had traditionally supported the Democratic Party.

        -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy [wikipedia.org]

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:45PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:45PM (#431232)

          I was addressing the left in general. They hide their racism and bigotry in plain sight by systematizing & justifying it with envy politics, victimhood hierarchy & the "progressive" stack. When you get them in a room alone and talk to them about these minorities that they claim to champion, they tend to let some racist and bigoted comments slip. They get the dopamine hit from pretending to be moral & judging others, but they are a party of hypocrites. I do not need to make a distinction between the party and the people who lead the party.

          People are fallible. Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater were corrupt power hungry politicians who deviated from the republican platform because of their own greed.

          Which is more defensible? Mob rule, or the rule of law & everyone is equal under the law. Mob rule is democracy. The rule of law & everyone equal under the law is what the republican party stands for. You can claim that it "changed", but really, it just had corruption for periods of time. The republican ideals are defensible and we can reform the party to implement real equality & justice, but mob rule will always be problematic.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @03:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @03:19PM (#430551)

    Speaking as someone who has no love lost for most liberals, the God Emperor also seems set to make the same mistakes that the Republicans always do when they ascend: loss of civil rights.

    This is what keeps the libertarians faithful and growing, and ultimately turns the hand to democrats (although if anyone bothers to examine the record, the dems are shit here as well) once people get sick of the moralizing from the right (don't doubt for an instance anyone has forgotten those days).

    Trump may be in the rare position to write his own future with how simply repugnant the liberals are these days, but it remains to be seen if republicans will fall into old bad habits and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @04:51PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @04:51PM (#430636)

      Nobody has any sense of strategy. They just react to the "other side's" bad actions, rather than realizing both sides are terrible at this point and that even if they lose this election if they vote en-masse for a non D/R candidate they can at minimum call attention to their dissatisfaction (given sufficient lost votes.) and can perhaps in the next election get their new candidate(s) elected into public office due to the mindshare they have provided for them.

      Now that said, NONE of the candidates this election warranted that, which is probably why Trump 'won' via the Electoral College, but more or less tied as far as the popular vote goes (Well other than the fact that the Civil War never ended and segregation of the country along political lines is critically needed.)

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @03:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @03:33PM (#430561)

    > Democratic strategist: I know, we can get white people to vote for us if we denigrate them enough :

    So, people got so tired of being falsely accused that they decided to make the crime fit the punishment.
    Logic!

    > I haven't seen the Democratic party so angry since the Republicans freed all their slaves back in 1865. The god emperor truly is glorious.

    And I thought I was a greybeard.
    You win the prize for oldest poster on soylent.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @04:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @04:17PM (#430591)

      "So, people got so tired of being falsely accused that they decided to make the crime fit the punishment."

      You can only kick the most docile of dogs so much before it bites you. It isn't the dog's fault.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @05:04PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @05:04PM (#430653)

        You must be one of those terrible libruls, calling good, decent, honest, hardworking americans dogs.
        What, that's not what you meant?
        What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @04:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @04:54PM (#430640)

    Where exactly did Hillary's camp use those phrases? And she did correct her "deplorable" statement. Trump rarely corrects or apologizes. And to my ear, Trump's statements ARE racist, xenophobic, and sexist. Why they are not to Trump supporters, I have no fricken idea. It's a puzzle. Progressives minds must process words differently, I guess.

    Trump won because he lied better. Manufacturing is not coming back, at least in noticeable numbers. Retraining, Hillary's solution, is more realistic. Hillary had the smarter, more logical solution. Automation marches on with or without Trump.

    But most people hate change and want their OLD jobs back, as it was. Trump told them what they wanted to hear.

    I'm not sure there is a good way to politically package the ugly reality of automation-related job turmoil. Humans are emotional creatures, and Trump played those emotions better. Should democrats wallow in similar used-car-salesperson-like tactics of fear, uncertainty, and doubt to win next time? Win with slime or lose with honesty; that's an ugly situation to be in.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by curunir_wolf on Monday November 21 2016, @06:03PM

      by curunir_wolf (4772) on Monday November 21 2016, @06:03PM (#430709)

      Where exactly did Hillary's camp use those phrases? And she did correct her "deplorable" statement.

      Not really. She said she shouldn't have said "half". She didn't clarify what percentage she thinks she should have used. "All", maybe?

      And to my ear, Trump's statements ARE racist, xenophobic, and sexist.

      It's called confirmation bias. He's responsible for what he says (and there is plenty of that to dislike), but only you are responsible for what you hear.

      Manufacturing is not coming back, at least in noticeable numbers. Retraining, Hillary's solution, is more realistic.

      The number and type of jobs Americans are going to have is debatable, but what's clear is Hillary's policies will mostly create jobs overseas, while Trump's will create more jobs for Americans. There is no denying that. "Retraining" people for jobs that are here now while accelerating globalization to push more jobs away is nothing but delaying the inevitable, but now you have "retrained" people for jobs that are now also being outsourced.

      But most people hate change and want their OLD jobs back, as it was. Trump told them what they wanted to hear.

      Well... they wanted some hope for a future, and Hillary really wasn't offering anything. The entire Democratic Convention did nothing to address it but act like everything is fine and "We should help people that feel like things are getting better to understand how great things are." They didn't even acknowledge it as a real problem, but an imagined one. When people are seeing their wages stagnant but all their bills going up, they don't want to be told their declining lifestyle is all in their imagination. They know better.

      Should democrats wallow in similar used-car-salesperson-like tactics of fear, uncertainty, and doubt to win next time?

      Maybe, instead, they could shift their priorities a bit.

      • Stop focusing on global government and try focusing on American economy and issues.
      • Stop spending Trillions of dollars on regime change in the Middle East.
      • Spend some infrastructure money on US infrastructure instead of Iraqi infrastructure that's just going to get blown up next year.
      • How about $700 billion for a bailout of the middle class instead of the wealthy banks and Wall Streeters? After 8 years in power the ones that caused the crisis got bonuses and jobs in the administration instead of indictments.
      • Approval of virtually every single global multinational corporate merger. From the party that claims to protect the "little guy" from the big corporations. Making that claim and doing nothing to prove it just outs them as liars.

      The above list is really short. But I'm out of time right now.

      --
      I am a crackpot
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @06:39PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @06:39PM (#430734)

        It's called confirmation bias

        Confirmation bias works both ways. If my brain can be fooled by it, so can yours. Your brain has not been proven to be special such as to avoid it. Our egos tell each of us we have better brains, but reality ignores egos.

        It's moot anyhow on a practical level, a large portion of the population VIEWS such statements as offensive to their group, and Trump/GOP have to face that perception regardless of whether it's real or not.

        (Science hasn't proven that perception objectively false, I would note.)

        but what's clear is Hillary's policies will mostly create jobs overseas, while Trump's will create more jobs for Americans.

        Sorry, that's not clear at all. Granted, IF Trump can pull off brilliant trade negotiations, perhaps he actually could stop some of the offshoring. I wouldn't bet on it because he's more brag than substance, but let's wait and see...

        Stop spending Trillions of dollars on regime change in the Middle East.

        That's one area on agree with T on, and it's pretty close to O's later in his term. But most of the damage was caused by the W-led Iraq invasion, which T was more or less for at the time. M.E. spending under O and H was a tiny fraction of that. It's not really a big difference between the candidates.

        How about $700 billion for a bailout of the middle class instead of the wealthy banks and Wall Streeters?

        Please elaborate? Banks are key infrastructure, for good or bad: we cannot just let most fail. The real solution would be to break them up into smaller banks: they are STILL too big to fail, and T doesn't seem interested in solving that either.

        Spend some infrastructure money on US infrastructure instead

        Democrats have been trying to do this for a while. GOP keeps blocking it.

        Approval of virtually every single global multinational corporate merger.

        That's not true. O stopped the Pfizer merger, for example. "Non intervention" in business transactions, including mergers, was typically more of a GOP position. We don't know yet how T will deal with that. He's talked a little about it, but being T, it's hard to really know until it happens.

        I can see voting T justifiable as an "experiment": what we have been doing hasn't worked so well, so let's try something completely different. That's arguably a realistic viewpoint, but T has too many personal quirks and an A.D.D.-like personality to trust him with "the lab". You guys should have tried your big experiment with somebody sane.

        But back to the issue of jobs, even the best trade deals cannot stop the changes caused by automation, only postpone the inevitable. H's retraining plan had a better shot of solving or improving that because it's based on the assumption that automation will only get better and that it's a bigger threat to blue-collar jobs than trade.

        T looks back, H looks forward = "progressive"

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @07:53PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @07:53PM (#430791)

          I can see voting T justifiable as an "experiment": what we have been doing hasn't worked so well, so let's try something completely different. That's arguably a realistic viewpoint,

          Ironically, that was essentially the neo-con argument for invading Iraq.
          I hope this shake-up turns out a lot better than that. A LOT.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @09:44PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @09:44PM (#430852)

            Usually those who make the big mistakes double-down on the justification rather than admit. It's often the next generation of politicians who benefit from the hard-lesson of the "experiment". GOP is less likely to support invading a country for indirect reasons now because of the Iraq disaster and perhaps less likely to deregulate banks after the mortgage crash. (Note "less" is still greater than zero. Also, Bill C. contributed to bank dereg, and thus it's not entirely GOP's doing.)

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 21 2016, @09:57PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 21 2016, @09:57PM (#430866)

      Trump's statements ARE racist, xenophobic, and sexist. Why they are not to Trump supporters, I have no fricken idea.

      There's a lot of ways to unpack that, or to explain how it sounds from here.

      First of all there's a lot of growing anti-white anti-male anti-white-areas-of-the-country ("flyover country" "hatred of white suburbs" etc). So in a world full of hate, why would any, say, white male dude vote for a candidate who hates them? Nobody would ever blame a black guy for not voting for a Klansman. Its the same logic. I should vote for Hillary because she hates my sex and race and where I live, woo hoo sign me right up for an "I'm with her" tee shirt. The message of the Democratic party holds negative value for me. The party of the anti-white, the anti-male, the anti-middle class, the anti-suburbanite, the anti-cis, the anti-marriage, the anti-...

      The next pragmatic problem is that we're electing a leader not a saint. I'm sure St. Mother Theresa of Calcutta never said the N word, and that's kinda important for a saint. Who knows if Hillary did or not. I don't care if Trump did. In the movies and escapist fiction the hero is always a saint but in reality they're pretty much a cross section of humanity complete with nice folks and A-holes. If Trump were a great leader but really hated Samoans I guess it would kinda suck if you're a Samoan, but not being one myself I'd rather have the competent leader than the nicest imaginable guy who can't lead starving dogs to raw meat. Classic display of the eternal argument over the superiority of alpha male vs beta male values. Trumps not much of a beta male, that's for sure. I'm OK with that. In the grand scheme of balancing worth, that kind of legacy topic is not a major input anymore. If I remember right, George Bush hates broccoli. Sorry, but don't care much about that topic.

      Another pragmatic problem is everyone to the right of Lenin for my entire life has been "literally Hitler". So we hear Trump is literally Hitler. Cool. I have always voted for people who were literally Hitler and I probably always will, as long as Democrats think they're brilliantly witty by calling every Republican since Coolidge a literal Hitler. Thanks for reminding me that Trump is a good traditional pick. On paper he's a better literal Hitler than Bush and given the chance in the primaries I'd have voted Trump not Bush despite them both being good little literal Hitlers. It similar to the argument that to a hard core leftist, all whites are racist, therefore I am and so is Trump. Cool, thats how I identify the right guy to vote for.

      The problem with a dog whistle like those words is what if the dog just doesn't react to it anymore? Its tired, low energy. I'm sure it would have won an election in 1968, but it hasn't been 1968 in a couple years now. Just like total control of the press and academia would have guaranteed a win in 1976, but Trump had the 2016 memes so he won instead because nobody cares about lying legacy fake news clickbait media anymore like the NYT or CBS or CNN or ... Why would I ever vote for someone with a NYT endorsement? Those people are themselves one of the the problems we have, not the annointer of solutions. Maybe they can find some POS college professor who knows less about politics than my plumber to anti-endorse Trump, cool, that means I should vote for Trump. When people who are the problem, anti-endorse the candidate, the candidate is identified as the solution.

      So there's at least four distinct ways to unpack the same statement from the political other side, perhaps some aspect resonates, or not.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @10:32PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @10:32PM (#430882)

        The urban-vs-rural culture wars have always been a factor in the elections. That shouldn't be a game changer. What seems to be the difference THIS time is job loss. As mentioned above, the Democrat's solution is more logical (to us), the Democrats just sold/described/presented it poorly: we did a crappy sales job. Trump tried to blame the job loss on outsiders, when in fact automation is a much bigger factor. The Democrats' plan addressed this with a more realistic solution: retraining and better education.