It has become sport within popular culture to suppose supporters of Donald Trump are ignorant, bigoted, culturally regressive and mean spirited. That may describe the man himself, but it is folly to dismiss his followers so easily. There is an angry dissatisfaction with the state of affairs that will persist long after this election. Mr. Trump didn’t invent this anger; he is merely exploiting three enabling conditions.
The first of this is the intensifying disregard for truth in politics. Electioneering has always been vigorously nasty, and I don’t suggest we have passed out of some golden age of political discourse. But governing has largely been conducted within reasonable limits of truthfulness. The Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush administrations all paid a heavy political price for actual or apparent deceits. Hillary Clinton disregards truthfulness with unfettered abandon. This has served the dual purpose of desensitizing us to Mr. Trump’s wholesale disinterest in objective truth, while offering no reasonable antidote in the Democratic nominee.
Whether Hillary’s lies are worse than Donald’s are likely a matter of personal judgment. That they are both an order of magnitude greater than anything like what has come before is not. Among the electoral elite, there is no penalty for extreme mendacities. Donald Trump surely benefits from this, but he isn’t its creator.
The second enabling condition is the exploding and explosive hyper-racialism of the day. Once the sole venue of the extremes of politics — think Ku Klux Klan and Black Panthers — racial labeling, identity and resentment are now mainstream phenomena. Students at many American universities are now subject to extraordinary efforts at racial labeling and identity politics orientation. They take classes from professors who list their gendered-racial origin before their academic credentials and sit through “white privilege” training. This is aimed squarely at Americans of European and increasingly Asian descent.
Mr. Trump calls this political correctness, but whatever its name, it cripples our ability to talk frankly about immigration, inner-city policing and the terrorist threat. The best example is simply this; if #whitelivesmatter is racist, and it surely is, what can we honestly but safely say about #blacklivesmatter?
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. offered a tractable, morally complete vision for us to overcome a vile history of slavery and racial bigotry. Americans of goodwill have been pursuing this path for half a century. But the illusionary post-racial world of President Obama’s rhetoric has yielded to a corrosive and culturally destructive reality of ethnic tribalism that threatens any sense of a shared future. Donald Trump is merely riding the train of racial resentment; he isn’t its engineer.
The third major empowering condition of Donald Trump is tepid and uneven economic growth. The U.S. economy has 3 million fewer high school graduates working now than it did in 2008, and 3.5 million fewer jobs for those without a high school diploma over the same period. Quite simply, there has been no net job growth for folks with a high-school diploma or less for 25 years. These job losses are highly concentrated in places with a high share of manufacturing employment at the turn of the century — think Akron, Ohio, Muncie, Ind., and Wheeling, W.Va. In contrast, jobs for college graduates have grown by almost 10 million over the same period. Wages have followed the predictable course, with growth at the top and declines at the bottom.
No doubt there are recent policies that exacerbate this trend, but it is hardly new. Machinery, robotics and the way we organize and deliver goods and services to consumers have changed at a stunning pace. The demand for highly skilled workers has grown, while the need for those without some college has declined. These are global economic forces accompanied by unease, resentment, heartbreak and a natural desire for an easily understood villain. Free trade is an expedient culprit.
Serious economic research concludes the share of manufacturing jobs lost to trade, or “trade deals” in Mr. Trump’s vernacular, is in the 10% to 20% range. That is perhaps 1.5 million factory jobs, or about all the jobs gained so far in 2016. The woes of the working class are due not to trade, but to the difficulty in negotiating a rapidly changing workplace. Trump didn’t create the economic woes of our day, but he fabricated their cause and remedy.
Whatever the outcome of this election we are stuck with three disheartening trends — lack of trust in the political class, deeply divisive racial politics and slow economic growth — that will continue to dominate American politics. Mr. Trump’s remedies to these issues won’t lessen any of these problems, but he isn’t the author of the growing discontent that will remain with us long after he is gone.
Michael J. Hicks is the George and Frances Ball distinguished professor of economics and the director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind.
This article was originally published on Marketwatch.
