From an email to a British friend
One more contributor to Trump’s win that hasn’t been sufficiently acknowledged: it’s one of the consequences of the collapse of labor unions. My father (Teamsters) and my paternal grandfather (Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen) were both union men. Back in the day, almost every union man in America was a Democrat, because the GOP was the party of Big Business. That is also why the GOP was, it seemed permanently, a minority party.
But when industrial production started moving overseas and the unions got weaker, their leaders tried to play a weakened hand as though it were still a strong hand. (This of course happened in your country as well. I started to write “R.I.P. Arthur Scargill” but did a quick check and he’s still alive!) It was no longer necessary for the Dems to please the unions, and the party soon left them behind — and the people who belonged to them, and the people who never joined unions but did the same kinds of work — and pursued the more interesting clientele of student activists and their professors.
Meanwhile the GOP continued to be the GOP, so there was no party left to advocate for blue-collar workers. There were of course isolated figures who upheld the old commitments, most notably Bernie Sanders; but Bernie was from the Northeast and therefore an alien to most of the nation’s workers, for whom “socialism” is a dirty word anyway.
Then Donald Trump came along and said to the workers “I’ll be your defender.” Few politicians could be a less plausible fit for that role, or less likely to keep promises … but he was the only one to show up. It was a classic businessman’s move: He saw a large and wholly untapped market and he moved into it. And here we are.
I find myself remembering early 2016, when in my neighborhood — which is somewhat mixed: there are doctors and lawyers, but there are also plumbers and electricians and office workers of various kinds — was filled with political signs. About half of them were for Trump, and about half for Bernie. There were none, and I mean none at all, for Hillary Clinton. When she was crowned as the Democratic nominee, the Bernie signs disappeared, leaving only Trump signs. Looking back, it seems like a moment freighted with symbolism, for those who can interpret it.
