At a Marin County, CA fundraiser back in the spring of
2008 candidate Barack Obama took a stab at explaining the vast cultural gap
that separates Turkeyfoot, PA from Marin
County.
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot
of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and
nothing’s replaced them, Obama said.
And they fell through the Clinton
Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration
has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And
it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or
antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or
anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
– April 6,
2008
It seems like a million years ago - yet how prescient was that? However crudely Obama stumbled into this –
Donald Trump picked it up and ran with it.
All the way to the White House.
I
may loathe Donald Trump (the person) but I absolutely get how his base
feels. Yeah, I get it. It is real. And the more I read those words the more unsettled even I can get.
Posts
At the end of the day the rural/urban divide is just another example of systemic inequality. There is only so much prosperity to go around, and market forces have spoken. Nobody is going to stomach paying what they did in 1960 (as % of income) for food. Too bad, the food was better and we were all much healthier.
ReplyDeleteI suppose that blaming immigration and trade is easier than coming to terms with permanent economic realities. But, hey it helps get out the vote for the red team.