Samain Thanksgiving Moon
It’s here! It’s here! Election day is finally here! The Forever Campaign will, hopefully, end today. Like watching the Chicxulub meteor arrive in slow motion. We know it’s coming, but we have no idea whether this will be an extinction level event or just a local catastrophe. That is, will it wipe out the entire country or just one party? I have no idea.
After following this campaign with amazement and dismay for nearly 18 months, I want to throw my hands up in the air, real high, take a deep breath, then assume the fetal position. No, not really.
Here’s my takeaway so far. The mud-wrestling over the arc of this campaign has obscured its significant implications. It’s not really about Trump vs. Clinton, or Republican vs Democrat. This election is about owning the distressing realities of late-stage capitalism. Creative destruction has been wrought by structural changes in international markets, robotic workers, an educational system lagging far behind these transitions, the abysmal economic collapse of 2008 and the long overdue bill for institutionalized racism having arrived in the morning mail. Those with the most significant unearned advantage in our culture: white men and women with no college education have suffered severe dislocation as a result.
The emergence into the public square of these matters is long overdue. The GOP “values” voter emphasis collected into the big tent a whole constituency of people who, economically speaking, should have been Democrats. While the Republicans cynically deployed the fears and prejudices of poor and working class whites (No gay marriage, no abortion, they’re coming to take away our guns), their elites used the political punch they gained to cut taxes for the wealthy, to give more and more latitude to corporate America (see Citizen’s United, for example) and put us into a Forever War with the Middle East.
What Trump did was strip away the elitist package of policies supported by the wealthy Republicans and lift up the real economic struggles of what is becoming a white underclass. I’m not saying he did that with any intention of rectifying the problems. No, in fact, I believe the opposite; but, as a demagogue, he tuned into the pain of the left behind. Their pain is real; his candidacy as advocacy for solutions to that pain is not. He’s the political equivalent of an opiod, temporary pain relief with no therapeutic effect on the underlying problem
We have a generation, maybe more, of citizens who are failing to find purchase in our economy. Institutional racism explains the ongoing marginalization of people of color while economic disadvantage locks them into its results. What is somewhat new is the marginalization of under and uneducated whites. I say somewhat because white poverty has always surpassed, in strictly numerical terms, all other groups in our country.
What has changed? The myth of upward mobility, so often used to pacify working class white ambitions, especially working class white males, has been unveiled, unmasked. There is no ladder out of a life with a high-school education, not in this economy. And, the largest number of voting age Americans fall in the white, no college demographic.
There is an opening here, though I don’t how to exploit it, for a traditional political approach: increase unemployment benefits, fund job transition education programs, create regulatory advantages for unions, ensure housing and medical care for all persons shut out of jobs with a real living wage. These policies should function as solutions for no college whites, and no college people of color, too.
My fervent hope is that this election forces us as a nation to confront, together, these problems. If it does, it will have been worth the weirdness.
