#^d 2016-11-19 #^h Election Roundup

First, a few summary points, many drawing on my previous post-election piece:

One thing that we should bear in mind is that many disasters take a long time to fully reveal themselves. That Republican Congress elected in 1946 has had an especially long-lasting impact. George Brockway, for instance, cited a banking "reform" bill that they passed as the first chink in the deregulation that finally sunk the economy in 2008. More obvious was the Taft-Hartley Act, which made it significantly harder to form and maintain labor unions. After that act was passed, the CIO gave up on organizing unions in the South, which left American businesses with an alternative to union labor in the North. That, more than anything else, gradually ate away at the Rust Belt, leading to this year's Democratic debacle.

But then the Democrats haven't been passive observers to the destruction of their party's base. Harry Truman was so militantly opposed to worker strikes after WWII that he inadvertently validated the public opinion behind Taft-Hartley (a bill he vetoed, but his veto was overridden). And one can argue that the Clinton-sponsored NAFTA was the straw that broke the camel's back -- he's certainly the one who gets blamed, even though it was mostly Republicans who voted for the agreement.

On the other hand, the half-life of disasters certainly seems to be quickening, especially as public institutions become more and more corrupt, as wealth and income are distributed ever more inequally, as decades of bad choices slowly add up into harder ones. A lot of the links below concern the destruction of the middle class, especially in the Rust Belt, and raise the question of why even people who are still doing OK have become anxious about the economy. This can only remind me of a book published back in 1989, Barbara Ehrenreich's Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. And really, she wasn't way ahead of the learning curve. She was merely more perceptive than most people were. Recent books, such as the six recommended in the list below, focus more on those who have fallen, and who can't get up. But fear came first, and Democrats would have been better served had they recognized that, instead of blundering on and pushing more and more people down and out.


Here are a mess of links I've collected, thinking they may be of some interest (more or less alphabetical by author).


As I was putting this post together, I started reading Corey Robin's Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (2011), and noted this quote (p. 59) on the asymmetry between left and right, on how hard change is for the former, and how easy reaction is for the latter:

Where the left's program of redistribution raises the questions of whether its beneficiaries are truly prepared to wield the powers they seek, the conservative prospect of restoration suffers from no such challenge. Unlike the reformer or the revolutionary, moreover, who faces the nearly impossible task of empowering the powerless -- that is, of turning people from what they are into what they are not -- the conservative merely asks his followers to do more of what they always have done (albeit, better and differently). As a result, his counterrevolution will not require the same disruption that the revolution has visited upon the country.

My main worry about the Sanders campaign wasn't that he might get slandered and lose his appeal, but that there wasn't a strong enough movement under him to deliver on his promises. And that mattered, of course, because his promises mattered. By contrast, all Trump voters had to do was to put their guy in power. After that, go back to work, and let their new right-thinking leader do what needs to be done. I've never had any inkling why they would trust him with that power, but then I don't think like they do: I learned early to question all authority, and found that when you give a greedy monster more power he only becomes greedier and more monstrous. But in a way, the great appeal of the right is that it offers simplistic solutions, wrapped in a little virus of paranoia which allows them to be used again and again, regardless of their repeated failures.