I don’t know how many of you read Paul Krugman’s work. Krugman is a Nobel Prize winning economist who had the bad judgment to leave the faculty of my alma mater. If you have the patience for well-reasoned argument, Krugman is very interesting. But Krugman has been shaking his head. The economy gets better but people think it’s worse. They think there are fewer jobs but there are more.
Trump supporters are furious about the loss of their jobs and industries. Whatever we think about Trump and the foolishness of his responses, his supporters’ grievances are real – the economy has been changing and industries have been moving geographically among the states, with respect to qualifications to do the work, and the balance between men and women in the workforce.
But Trump’s supporters are also having trouble dealing with the fact that it’s the Democrats who are actively trying to solve their problems.
But angry heartland voters support politicians who, as Krugman elaborated, “oppose the very programs that aid these depressed areas. Trump tried … to kill the Affordable Care Act. [And] Not a single Republican voted for the Inflation Reduction Act, which is helping to create manufacturing jobs in the heartland.” [close quote]
What’s going on?
This week I’d like to describe the problem and in subsequent weeks try to describe what seems to be causing it.
Trump supporters want their old worlds back – coal, gas guzzlers, etc.
But it’s capitalism that threatens their worlds.
As explained by the great Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter, capitalism is a process of “creative destruction.” If a product or a process can solve a problem more cheaply or effectively, then dump the old and buy into the new. That’s capitalism and it results in a great deal of very uncomfortable dislocation and disruption. There are advantages to that ability to move and change but it hurts, and sometimes the results are not pretty.
Democrats have been trying to meet that head on. They have been supporting efforts to replace jobs and industries that capitalism has been disrupting, or where the consequences of legacy industries have become unsupportable.
There’s nothing new about that – America has been doing that since we improved the ports and built the canals, the roads, the railroads and the airports – all with very substantial public investment. And President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act Donating Public Lands to the several States and Territories … [to] provide Colleges for the Benefit of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts – in other words the modernization of American farming and engineering dates back to Abraham Lincoln in 1862. The only difference is that beginning with the Great Depression of the 1930s, it’s been the Democrats who have supported investment and Republicans who have resisted. And all of it has been to strengthen and improve capitalism.
But Trump with his usual process of making pronouncements and expecting people to believe them regardless of their relation to the facts, calls that communism. Just the opposite, Democrats want to respond to the challenges of capitalism, not destroy it.
Trump, by contrast, attacks regulation regardless of what capitalism is doing to people and claims he’s for the people because he wants to let capitalism run rampant over their lives.
The result is that those injured by the creativity of capitalism are supporting those who claim to help them by resisting all efforts to help them out by investing in people and in infrastructure.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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