Trump's Tribalism, a Sign of Our Times
Grant Trump this much: He seems to have a better idea than his party's elites do of what their working-class and lower-middle-class base desperately wants to hear. They need to beat his balderdash with better ideas.
Sure, maybe he's a "counterfeit conservative," as his critics on the right charge, noting his past support for Clinton when she was a New York senator. But Trump was a savvy enough tactician to recognize a huge -- or, in Trumpspeak, "yuge" -- enthusiasm gap in the GOP rank and file, especially, it turns out, among working-class to lower-middle-class voters.
Workers with no more schooling than high school have taken it on the chin since the 1950s with job losses, wage stagnation and other crises, partly because of policies favored by GOP elites.
Small wonder, then, that Trump-licans express the deepest resentments about elites from both parties who send jobs overseas and welcome more immigrants in to keep wages low.
It offers these embattled Americans little solace to be told that immigrants and free-trade policies in the long run bring more jobs, consumers and taxpayers to the American economy than they take away. As the economist John Maynard Keynes famously pointed out, in the long run, we're all dead.
More often, we see or hear blue-collar GOP voters looking at the changes American life has undergone since the 1950s and seeing a much gloomier picture than my fellow African-Americans, for example, see.
Looking back, I can see signs of this Trump-ready sentiment rising in polls after President Barack Obama's election. For the first time, they showed black Americans feeling more optimistic about their futures than white Americans did. More recent polls show that racial-ethnic optimism gap persists.
That's sad, but not unique in our diverse country's experience. As the great civil rights leader Whitney Young used to say, we all may have come to America on different ships, "but we're in the same boat now." Our future will be decided by how well we can row together.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
