If you don’t like the Donald Trump Presidency, then there are some questions you need to address.  First, is Trump what the Brits call a “one off,” or is he the leading edge of a new wave in American politics?[1]  Second, what led to Trump’s election?  No, it wasn’t the Russians.  No, it wasn’t Hillary Clinton’s incompetence as a politician.  Both are real, but the decisive factors lay elsewhere.  On the one hand, Donald Trump decided to target the grievances of white, working-class men.  On the other hand, Donald Trump decided to run as a Republican, rather than in his natural home as a Democrat.  Like “Bud” White, “he’s not as stupid as he seems.”

The grievances of white working-class men are real.  Once upon a time, they were the mainstays of the “New Deal Coalition” that put Democrats into the White House from 1932 to 1952, from 1960 to 1968, and from 1976 to 1980, along with various majorities in Congress.  Unionized working-class jobs gave blue-collar workers middle-class incomes.  Then they fell by the wayside for complex reasons: mostly mechanization, but also the two successive oil “shocks” of the 1970s, organized labor’s attack on struggling employers in the 1970s, foreign competition, and ideological shifts in the two major parties.  Then, in the 1990s, China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) under favorable terms compounded the problems of American industry.

As a result, men’s industrial employment declined, new jobs shifted to other geographic areas;[2] new jobs required “college” rather than “vocational” education; and the social world of the “left behind” disintegrated (single motherhood, alcohol and drug use, general demoralization).[3]

No one in either party had bothered to address those grievances.  The suburban base of the Republicans lives in blue oxford-cloth shirts and Dockers (or the female equivalent).  The Democrats have embraced “identity politics,” which excludes the identity of the white working class.  These are “post-industrial” societies.

As a result Trump’s campaign could drag into the ranks of the Republicans a bunch of normally Democratic voters or non-voters.  The opened the possibility of a Republican presidential victory that must have seemed far-fetched if any of the other munchkins running for the nomination won in the primaries.  Republicans lined up behind Trump and they will do so again in 2020.  They get to pack the federal courts for the lifetime of the appointees.  They get to stall and roll-back the imperial decrees of Barack Obama.

Are we—as a country—better for it?

[1] That’s a disturbing thought.  In twenty years we could be talking about John Carpenter’s “Trump Tower: Power Outage.”  In 2025, radical environmentalists (but I repeat myself) sabotage the federally-mandated coal-fired generating plants that power New York City.  Suddenly, the nightlight of the city-that-never-sleeps go dark.  The elevators (and escalators) and AC and cable-television stop working.  Chaos breaks out in the streets below, but atop Trump Tower a “celebrity roast” of former members of the Trump Administration is underway.  Comments by Jim Mattis, Reince Priebus, H.R. McMaster, Hope Hicks, Sarah Saunders, Jim Comey, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Nancy Pelosi, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, etc.  I suppose the deranged killer haunting Trump Tower could wear a Robert Mueller hockey mask.

[2] Try selling your house if you live in Erie, PA.

[3] See: Isabel Sawhill, The Forgotten Americans (2019) and Oren Cass, The Once and Future Worker (2019).  If this is what happened to white Americans, then what are we to make of the impact of “liberal paternalism” on African-Americans since the 1960s?