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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @05:11PM
If there is a populist loose on America, then nonsense like SJW-style identity politics while ignoring basic economics of a vast segment of population put him there! If you care more about who uses which restroom than you do whether a great sector of the population has something to put on the dinner table tonight, then you do not get to lecture about economics ever.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday November 21 2016, @05:21PM
Bullshit. The median income of trump voters was higher than the median income of Hillary voters, according to exit polls. You wanted a xenophobic idiot because you're xenophobic idiots, not because your economic needs were ignored.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @06:24PM
That'll be enough of that, you two. This was an intelligent discussion up until now.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday November 21 2016, @07:13PM
Oh fuck off. Defending stupid pieces of shit with dishonesty doesn't deserve respect. The GGP lied. You want to ignore that lie, so you did and focused on my tone. Well boo hoo.
Letting lies and bullshit are exactly why Trump got elected, as much as you love to complain about how people telling the truth in a way that hurts your feelings are.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @09:34PM
Your tone is what got Trump elected. Rest assured, without the "I hate the self-righteous dickweeds on the left" vote, Trump would have lost.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:23AM
From the outside looking in, I'd say that the Democrats running a non-likeable right winger was as much a reason for Trump, who is pretty left, or at least pretends to be, when it comes to the truly left things like decent jobs for the common person.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:56AM
Honestly, what made Trump win could be called as anything that would have swayed enough votes the other way. Not being assholes would have done it, not running Hillary, even just telling her to stop smirking every time he spoke in the debates might have done it. Not calling half the nation racist, misogynist, homophobic assholes would definitely have cinched it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.