The GOP's War on Labor Unions Helped Elect Trump

While there is no single explanation for how and why Donald Trump, despite losing the popular vote by a still growing margin, managed to win the Electoral College.   One, as previously noted in a post on this blog, was the rage of evangelical Christians against modernity in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan that led them to support Trump even though I suspect a year or two from now they will be questioning their votes as Trump fails to return jobs to rust belt states. A second reason is that the GOP's relentless war on labor unions is now bearing fruit.  The decline in labor unions accomplished several goals for the GOP: (i) it significantly decreased union ability to get out the vote for Democrats, and (ii) it accelerated the decline in wages that caused the blue collar works to swing to Trump in desperation.  Thankfully, a right to work effort in Virginia was defeated last Tuesday as Virginia remained blue for the third presidential cycle.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this insidious agenda of the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

One of the biggest surprises on election night occurred as Americans watched Democratic strongholds in the Rust Belt turn red. A few in particular—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio—were especially shocking. These states—once thriving manufacturing centers with powerful labor unions—had voted for Democratic presidents for decades. This election, they chose Trump.

It’s no coincidence that these states, with their large percentages of blue-collar workers, were also the backdrop for contentious, Republican-led battles to weaken labor unions, battles that the labor movement ultimately lost in Michigan in Wisconsin.  . . . . This means that unions wind up with less less money and thus wield less influence to get out the vote for Democrats, the party with which they’ve long been allies.  

“Republicans knew this would decimate unions, and now we can see the impact,” says Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island.

Back in the 1980s, unions represented 22 percent of private-sector workers, he says. Now they represent only about 8 percent. Loomis points to two major historical shifts that inflicted major damage to the labor movement: the drying up of manufacturing jobs in the late 1970s as factories moved overseas, and more recently, Republican-led movements to pass laws restricting unionization. This year, West Virginia became the 26th state to pass right-to-work laws, which went into effect this summer.

But it’s not just right-to-work laws that have weakened the labor movement. Unions had tried to stop the impacts of globalization and automatization, Loomis says, but “they were overwhelmed by a bipartisan belief in globalized trade and nobody has taken long-term unemployment and community decline seriously.” Neither Ohio nor Pennsylvania has passed right-to-work legislation, but their industries—and the chance that they would vote Democratic—have fallen nevertheless.

The election results in Nevada reflect a stark contrast. Hillary Clinton won the state with the help of the labor movement, and in particular, with the help of Culinary Workers Union, which put on an aggressive campaign to mobilize its 57,000 members to vote for Democrats. Clinton won by a large margin in Nevada and so did the state’s Democratic Senate candidate, Catherine Cortez Masto. “The key difference is that they were able to organize working-class people to get their votes,” says Loomis.

There is also another key difference: The Culinary Union is mostly made up of Latino workers in the hotel and service industry, a different demographic from the predominantly white factory workers in the Rust Belt who made up the base of the labor movement there and have since seen their jobs disappear.

In the end, it may have been a combination of a weakening labor movement and Trump’s strong anti-trade, anti-globalization message that helped him win the White House.

As I have said, it will be interesting to see if and when Trump's blue collar, low information supporters turn on him when he fails to magically bring jobs back to the rust belt.   

Trump and the Exploitation of White Male Rage

The husband and I are in Somerset, Pennsylvania for the weekend for family reunions on my husband's side.  As in the past, the area makes the Hampton Roads area of Virginia seem like the cosmopolitan, liberal center of the universe in comparison.  Indeed, in driving around town and the countryside, we have yet to see a single Hillary yard sign.  In contrast we have seen a number of Trump signs.  The Somerset area is in some ways a perfect setting for Trump and the white male rage that he is exploiting to fuel is frightening campaign if one listens to the regular media narrative: mostly white, many non-college educated, and a region where the demise of coal mining and other industries has hit the economy hard.  However, a new Gallup survey suggests that the narrative is at least partially incorrect.  The real root of the rage: the poison of Fox News and right-wing talk radio, plus a heavy dose of sense of lost white male privilege.  A piece in Salon looks at the issue.  Here are highlights:

We’ve all seen the videos replayed over and over again on social media and cable news. The past couple of weeks, however, featured two videos illustrating what I’d consider to be typical Trump supporters. Indeed, by now many of us can easily profile a Trump voter before they even have a chance to shout “Traitor!” into our not-surprised faces.

Generally speaking, Trump supporters are non-college-educated white men, ranging from younger “bros” to, more typically, white male baby-boomer retirees with plenty of spare time to be relentlessly irradiated by Fox News and AM talk radio.

While the lack of a college diploma binds most Trump supporters together, there are more obvious tells — ones that we can plainly see but that can’t be fully measured by pollsters. Specifically, it’s not easy to quantify the growing resentment of white males who believe they’re slowly losing their millennia-long grip on societal power. Likewise, it’s difficult to measure the brainwashing of Trump’s loyalists by the Fox News and talk radio echo-chamber. Yet we see it on display every day.

[A] similar incident occurred with an older white man who was filing out of a Trump rally in Kissimmee, Florida, but who stopped for a minute or two to completely humiliate himself by shouting incoherent bromides at the press. “You are traitors! I am an American patriot!” .... the man yelled, his eyes cartoonishly bulging out of his head. “I am a patriot! And your name is ‘Traitor!'” he continued to the delight of his fellow Trumpeteers.

The disconnect between how we expect older men like him to behave and how they’re comportingthemselves today is, in a word, disturbing.

Context is, of course, vitally important here. The Kissimmee fracas occurred seconds after Trump finished another of his rambling blurt sessions, and the man was obviously wound up and affected by what he heard. But we don’t expect older people to be this impressionable. . . . .  fully revealed his vulnerability to the suggestions of a charismatic would-be dictator, and didn’t mind his unspooled rantings being recorded and aired by the press. He didn’t seem to be at all concerned, nor did it even occur to him how, to the rest of the thinking world, he came off as a crazy person. A laughingstock. Except to so many others just like him.

When discussing Trump’s base, sympathetic words are often tossed into the mix due to the common wisdom indicating how they’re frustrated with the allegedly awful economy, struggling to make ends meet. . . . [however]  a new study by Gallup shows that economic issues aren’t necessarily driving Trump’s base.

According to this new analysis, those who view Trump favorably have not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration, compared with people with unfavorable views of the Republican presidential nominee. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed. 

Gallup went on to suggest that other factors could be contributing to the discontent among white working-class Americans, but the economy and immigration don’t appear to be fully animating the mania that’s so prevalent among Trump’s people.

Trump isn’t necessarily responsible for the behavior of his most activated loyalists, but he’s certainly tapped into an existing cache of psychosis and he’s exploiting it for political gain. Trump’s base has been pre-tenderized by what David Frum calls the “conservative entertainment complex.” Since at least the Clinton administration, white men have been slowly indoctrinated and, in too many cases, brainwashed by conservative media and its rather loose grip on reality. 

A recently released documentary by Jen Senko, titled “The Brainwashing of My Dad,” covered this particular phenomenon: . . . . The film follows the life of Senko’s father, who was once a Kennedy Democrat and, through daily assaults by right-wing radio and television, transformed into a racist conservative zealot. Similarly, it’s not difficult to diagnose the Kissimmee man and his cohorts as having been similarly brainwashed by the extremist rhetoric of both conservative entertainment and the Republican Party itself . . . 

If you convince enough men that alleged outsiders (women, minorities, immigrants) are stripping them of their long-held power, as Fox News and others have done, there’s going to eventually be a fight, especially when one of those so-called outsiders is a black president with the middle name “Hussein.” Older white men don’t intend to hand over power quietly . . . . based on recent video footage, I wonder if they’re even aware of how ridiculously deranged they appear, alone or most often in large groups.

Ex-Reagan Official: Fox News is Brainwashing Republicans into a Fringe Group

Fox News - or Faux News as I call it on this blog - is first and foremost a propaganda machine that seemingly thrives in a universe detached from objective reality and which is moving the GOP towards becoming a lunatic fringe group.  Or so says economist Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.  Candidly, I agree with his assessment and continue to believe that the GOP is headed toward long term oblivion unless and until it throws off control of the Christofascists and their Tea Party first cousins.  A piece in The Raw Story looks at Bartlett's assessment.  Here are highlights:

Economist Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, warned over the weekend that Fox News had damaged the Republican Party by creating a bubble for conservatives to brainwash themselves.

In his paper “How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics” published earlier this month, Bartlett theorized that watching the network was essentially “self-brainwashing” for viewers, making them believe that the United States was a more conservative nation than it actually was. And so the Republican Party had responded by running radical conservatives that representative Fox News viewers, but not the true state of the electorate.

“Many conservatives live in a bubble where they watch only Fox News on television, they listen only to conservative talk radio — Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, many of the same people,” Bartlett told CNN’s Brian Stelter on Sunday. “When they go onto the Internet, they look at conservative websites like National Review, Newsmax, World Net Daily.”

“And so, they are completely in a universe in which they are hearing the same exact ideas, the same arguments, the same limited amount of data repeated over and over and over again. And that’s brainwashing.” 

Bartlett asserted that it was a bigger problem for conservatives than liberals because they did not have their own network for a long time, and then they “drank very heavily from the Fox waters.”

Sadly, some of my once upon a time Republican colleagues fit within Bartlett's description and have become so brainwashed that it is impossible to have an intelligent conversation with them.  Ironically, they claim that I am the one who has been brainwashed when, in fact, they need to look in the mirror at themselves.  Yes Karen, I am talking about you!!