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Nov 9, 2016
Trump won on a feeling of powerlessness
The professional left through the DNC delivered us an impressive defeat, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat by installing unpopular insider Hillary Clinton at the top of the ticket, instead of allowing record breaking independent Bernie Sanders to take the nomination and helping him sale to victory. The result; losing the presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and so much more at state and local levels.
This robust thumping should give the professional left and DNC insiders a chance to finally understand what they have refused to see about working people. People feel powerless. It’s that simple. Racism, misogyny and white privilege are embedded in Donald Trump’s hateful campaign, but they are not the primary motivation for most Trump supporters. Working citizens are having a hard time. They feel little power to shape their situation and their futures, or to protect their children and their communities from all sorts of threats, including the whims of big business and their own employers. They see (correctly) business in cahoots with big and local government. Maybe some of them are doing just fine in quantifiable terms, but whatever wealth can be attributed to them provides little agency. The power gap driven by historic wealth gap is simply too large. The professional class within the ranks of Liberal Democrats seem to delight ignoring this problem completely, or even apologizing for it (looking at you Paul Krugman). Donald Trump addressed this powerlessness directly in his campaign, and it’s not surprising it found resonance.
The professional left and the DNC have turned a blind eye to ongoing disempowerment, to their own peril. Nothing about the way they handled Sanders in the primary can be spun positively in light of this. But there’s a real chance for progressive Democrats to finally get the party on the right foot. Let’s talk about empowerment for working people. It doesn’t have to be unions — my favorite prescription is worker owned employers, an idea that sounds even bipartisan, evoking a great ownership society. The left already has a lock on compassion, but we need a positive vision to replace losing neoliberal and meritocratic idiocy. Losing has consequences, and the consequence of this loss is Donald Trump’s special brand of ignorance, regression and counterproductive GOP policy which will only make things worse for the very people who supported him — working people.