Well, it’s done. Trump didn’t announce that it was all a joke, as I had fantasized, so it’s time for some self examination.
I think that one would have to be blind, or in denial, do deny that the lives of working class voters, regardless of race, have gotten worse over the years.
For the people who are falling behind in our economy the following has happened:
- Employment has become less secure and less well remunerated, with the primary beneficiaries being senior management, and finance, particularly PE like Bain Capital.
- The cost of healthcare has increased while its quality had decreased, with the primary beneficiaries being the credentialed senior employees, doctors and administrators, who have benefited from this.
- The cost of college education has skyrocketed, taking it out of reach of many ordinary familys, with the primary beneficiaries being credentialed senior employees, like tenure track faculty and administrators (though not adjunct professors, or as Donna Shalala demonstrated, janetorial staff).
- A parasitic financial industry, which has created a heads I win, tails you lose situation with our pensions, IRSs, home mortgages, and 401(K)s.
- And then there is the whole opoid epidemic. As is observed over at Naked Capitalism:
That said, can we think of any reasons beyond despair why rural voters might vote red (and not blue)? I think we can, if we look at the role that urban credentialed professionals and institutions play. In “Credentialism and Corruption: The Opioid Epidemic and ‘the Looting Professional Class'” I wrote:
CEOs, marketing executives, database developers, marketing collateral designers, the sales force, middle managers of all kinds, and doctor: All these professions are highly credentialed. And all have, or should have, different levels of responsibility for the mortality rates from the opoid epidemic; executives have fiduciary responsibility; doctors take the Hippocratic Oath; those highly commissioned sales people knew or should have known what they were selling. Farther down the line, to a database designer, OXYCONTIN_DEATH_RATE might be just another field. Or not! And due to information asymmetries in corporate structures, the different professions once had different levels of knowledge. For some it can be said they did not know. But now they know; the story is out there. As reader Clive wrote:
Increasingly, if you want to get and hang on to a middle class job, that job will involve dishonesty or exploitation of others in some way.
And you’ve got to admit that serving as a transmission vector for an epidemic falls into the category of “exploitation of others.”
And I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to think that red-shift voters would identify Clinton’s base in the urban, professional classes with the very same people responsible for the opioid epidemic that was killing their families. Consciously? I don’t know. Viscerally? I’d bet on it.
I am not suggesting that everyone at Kos is somehow privileged and credentialed. (I am, however credentialed and priviliged).
What I am suggesting is that those of us who are, and continue to promote policies that benefit us at the expense of the rest of society. (Expanded IP protections, free trade that allows finance and pharma and Monsanto to pillage the rest of the world, etc.)
There is a whole lot of class privilege among the “professional class”, and we need to check our privilege.