"[Thomas] Frank warned that Kansas’s political realignment [after 2000] would go national, forcing American voters to choose between business-friendly fiscal conservatives and business-friendly fiscal conservatives who hoisted rainbow flags. That dystopian moment arrived in 2016, when “America’s blue-collar billionaire” won 62 percent of the white working-class vote."
Just talking with friends about how pre-2016 contemporary political books feel extra dated and irrelevant after the radical political changes of last eight years. But Frank's book from 2004, which I haven't read, might be the exception? Certainly, the above formulation sounds apt.
And "white working-class" feels like the key qualifying adjective here but I saw something online suggest that the partisan switch in Kansas, according to Frank, actually wasn't attributable to racism. That doesn't sound right but what about homophobia? Or other forms of culture war bigotry? This is how I take Etelson's quote, anyway: If both parties are perceived as being more or less equally "business-friendly fiscal conservatives," meaning always opposed to government spending (that helps the working classes), then stupid bigots are going to more easily be demagogued into opposing "rainbow flags" or Trans or "wokeness" as lynchpin culture war election issues.
Grump was definitely onto something in 2016 when he came out against NAFTA and other free-trade agreements. These agreements were terrible for American labor. Neolibs or supply-siders argued that this "free trade" would promote economic growth and move US labor up the labor value chain, offshoring cheap manufacturing jobs for better jobs in the finance and administration of global trade. These agreements did do that but did so by adding one banker for every four well paying working class jobs in manufacturing lost by the turn of the century and the blight of the "Rust Belt," which at this point feels like it has spread to engulf more or less all of rural America.
So Grump was right to protest so-called "free trade" agreements that favored capital over workers and the environment but his subsequent reforms of these trade agreements, not to mention his other trade-wars and tax cuts for the rich, turned out to be mostly empty bluster, completely indifferent to predatory capitalism, and did absolutely nothing for the working classes. And the truth is the two parties do not equally favor business elites over workers and never have or at least not since the New Deal and the 1930s, and it wasn't even close in the Biden/Harris vs Trump contest.
The question now, I'm afraid, will be how bad it will have to get for the working classes before they figure out they've been had by Grump and the republicans, again?
P.S. I'm also hearing analysts attributing voting shifts towards Grump and republicans in minority working class communities to frustrations with homelessness and crime. Again, assuming the republicans are better on crime is an electoral reflex at this point so divorced from reality as to be pathological. Grump will obviously not reduce homelessness or increase respect for law and order. He, in fact, obviously inspires grifting and violence. Imagining he is an antidote to crime is a fake-news perception of staggering consequence.
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