Nativism is a reaction to the decline of the middle classes prospects.
Half of America is not doing well and has been overlooked. The better educated amongst us are blinded by their own progress and weren’t looking inward.
We will see more focus on nativist policies in our lifetime as automation continues to eat jobs.
Correct. A lot of people wanted an "outsider" and to "drain the swamp". In other words they don't feel represented by their elected officials, or treated fairly by the government, and they want things to change.
Despite this desire being co-opted and twisted by Trump's campaign and Fox News, the underlying feelings are valid for a lot of people across the USA.
The Democratic party should have realized this back during Obama's "Hope" campaign. A message of change, of saying "what's happening right now isn't right and we need to fix that", that message really resonates with a lot of people.
Of course, as Obama found out when he became president, "the swamp" has its own interests at heart. All that good energy and hope broke like a wave against that huge political cliff, and had far less impact than everyone needed.
If you ask a lot of people to articulate this sort of feeling, they'll have difficulty. Hence the easier to understand populist rhetoric coming from Trump. He steered that behemoth of public opinion towards xenophobia and other negative feelings. It's easier to blame the other than to look deeply at your own life.
The Democratic party has to understand this or Trump will easily win his second term. Back when Trump got the Republican nomination, I had a deeply unsettling gut feeling about the election. Trump was entertaining, Clinton was not. In the same way, Obama was entertaining, McCain was not. Bush was entertaining, Kerry was not. Gore was not. I unfortunately don't really see any entertaining people on the Democratic side.
As for the automation question, I think Trump, or his Republican successor, could pivot very easily to saying that robots are going to take Good Old-Fashioned American Jobs(tm) and a lot of people will follow that message.
> As for the automation question, I think Trump, or his Republican successor, could pivot very easily to saying that robots are going to take Good Old-Fashioned American Jobs(tm) and a lot of people will follow that message.
I think this is interesting, because there's a Democratic candidate, Andrew Yang, gaining popularity because of this (relatively, considering he's coming out of nowhere). Though taking it with a different attitude. But I think this kinda goes to show that the message resonates across party lines (like with what you said about Obama and Trump).
And he wasn't too concerned about bipartisanship when it came to passing the ACA only a year later, arguably the biggest bill of the decade. There were several forms of procedural hardball happening in the process of passing that. It was certainly passed narrowly and along party lines. And, partly because of the lack of bipartisan agreement, not all of it survived court challenges.
If it's true that Obama was genuinely optimistic and down on cynicism during his 2008 campaign, he must have wised up quickly. Otherwise, maybe people read some things into the "Hope" message that weren't actually there. He came from the Chicago school of politics, though, so I'm skeptical that the narrative of broken good energy really fits.
And I think this sort of thing feeds into the Trump narrative of a "swamp" that needs draining. Obama certainly didn't come up with Washington partisanship, but the hard landing after all the Hope posters probably increased cynicism on the whole and gave Trump a chance. Remember, he didn't exactly win his election by a landslide.
The ACA is already a result of a lot and even more compromise. It's even modeled after a Republican plan implemented in a red state. (In Mass. when governed by Mitt Romney, who at first vetoed it then took credit for it.)
And yet it received basically no bipartisan support in Congress. The Romney stuff is a talking point, not a reasonable way to pursue bipartisan progress on healthcare (which is still a mess).
It received just enough to pass, don't forget that. And also don't forget that nowadays it receives just enough support to stay on the books.
Also. Talking point or not, it pretty much showcases that policymaking today is not a deliberate good faith iterative process what it should be. It's just a front in the culture wars.
> It received just enough to pass, don't forget that.
Kind of. One version passed the House, another the Senate (), and a questionable reconciliation process created a unified bill.
My point is that I don't find the "Obama nobly lost to the Swamp" narrative all that convincing. He could have required, say, 10 republican senators agree before (unsuccessfully) overhauling one of the largest parts of the economy. That* failing is what losing to the Swamp might look like.
Maybe that wouldn't have worked, to be fair. But preemptively deciding to play hardball doesn't fit the "The Swamp was too swampy for Obama" narrative.
(*) Including a vote from Arlen Specter, who switched parties mid-term and a vote in exchange for the infamous "Cornhusker Kickback".
Thank you for an interesting reply, you've rebutted the image of Obama pretty well. I think that my own personal feeling about Obama are very much affected by the political and social climate that has appeared since Trump was elected.
I think I agree with you on all of this, especially the Chicago comment.
That must be newly introduced in the last few days, considering the comments and posts I still see presented here frequently. Nevertheless, I'll take it to heart and flag things that break it.
You might have a mistaken idea of how much we're able to process here. HN gets many more comments and submissions than we're able to look at. Moderation amounts to spot checking.
Yeah, for a lot of people it's more about trajectory than the numbers. Even going up doesn't necessarily mean anything with inflation. And it's very hard to find essentials like housing here if you don't have a lot of money. I'm not very educated on the details of all this, but something about using long term mortgages as investment vehicles seems to be screwing with the market.
I don't really understand why a low end house costs something like $100,000 but a top of the line phone costs $1,000. The education, infrastructure, and materials required to make a house are all generally speaking a lot easier to come by than all of what's required for a phone. I know you can factory build phones and you need labor for a house, but you can factory build most of what a home is made of, too, and it's not like there isn't a lot of labor involved in all kinds of parts of a phone's journey (design, marketing, manufacturing, transportation, sales). I guess most of it has to do with land being finite and all the parts that make up a house? But something about that argument doesn't sit quite right with me either. It's very weird that a basic shelter, which is something people have been building themselves for thousands of years without any of the sophisticated tools we have now, is 100x more expensive than buying one of the most sophisticated, hard to design and manufacture things yet devised by man. I know houses have heating, cooling, plumbing, electricity, etc and aren't as simple as they used to be, but the price difference still seems wonky.
For a while I fantasized about building an obscenely simple house and living like a monk to save money and see how minimal I could get. I've done some camping and feel like I'd be happy living in a tent with a YMCA membership. But that's really not an option. There's no where to put up a tent or even a very modest little shack without paying tens of thousands of dollars for a strip of land to put it on, and you're never going to find much other than apartment buildings close to most of the places the work is. So even without the social stigma of living in a tent, you can't really do it.
I'm not saying life for the average person in Africa is better, and I generally agree with the sentiment that most Americans under-appreciate all the comforts of modern life.
But what's frustrating about the whole thing is there's not really a way to opt-out, and the entry price here for "being a normal part of society" seems to require most middle or lower class people to go into debt. It's a wonky, unnatural set up.
It sounds to me as though the setup only appears wonky and unnatural to us because it's an equilibrium of various needs and interests that clash against one another.
Yeah, I think that’s part of it. I understand that a lot more people want a place to live than want the newest phones, that no one wants to live next to bad neighbors, that people like having guests and competing for status, that land close to major cities is finite, etc... but it still seems weird that people are charging more money than what people actually have. If you took loans out of the equation, part of me thinks houses would start reflecting people’s actual needs and means better and would drop significantly in price. Eventually I think they would provide people with a sense of security rather than obligation since you’d have to buy them outright, and eventually that security would result in more creative/entrepreneurial activity. But maybe I’m just severely undervaluing all the work required to build a basic house/overestimating how much the process of building them could be streamlined so as to avoid loans.
Half of America is not doing well and has been overlooked. The better educated amongst us are blinded by their own progress and weren’t looking inward.
We will see more focus on nativist policies in our lifetime as automation continues to eat jobs.