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