Aren’t you a little sick of hearing about the angry voters?
Most of the media commentaries explain that this anger is the reason for Trump’s electoral success. If it’s so, do the voters have legitimate reasons for their anger? Or are Americans simply a bunch of pampered, coddled, spoiled brats who love to whine about their government no matter who’s in charge and no matter how things are going?
If the economy were in deep distress, voters would have something to be angry about. But when we look at the facts, there is no cause to whine. When elected, President Obama inherited one of the worst recessions in American history. Since 2009 the economy has recovered to the point where unemployment is down from nearly 10 percent to less than 5 percent. The federal deficit has shrunk from 12.1 percent of GDP in 2009 to just 2.4 percent in 2014. And the U.S. economy grew at 2.4 percent last year, the highest growth rate since the Great Recession. The United States now has the strongest economy in the world.
It is true that not all blue-collar workers have fully recovered from the recession. Many are angry because of the damage done to them by that period of lost jobs and lower income. They know that although the economy has rebounded, the real profits are going to the top 1 percent. That is not the Democrats’ fault, yet they seem to blame the Democrats and look to a man who is a personification of the top 1 percent, Donald Trump.
Are they angry about world affairs? Now that the economy is so good, Republicans have difficulty slamming President Obama over his domestic achievements, so they attack him on foreign policy claiming that he is weak with and obsequious to radical jihadists. Tell it to Osama bin Laden! It is interesting to hear how Republicans waffle about how to handle ISIS. One never hears them say explicitly that we should send an army of “boots on the ground” to the Middle East. Yet despite the president’s campaign of heavy bombing, and despite the fact that ISIS is now administering its shrinking “Islamic State” from the smithereens of its remaining headquarters, the Republicans complain that Obama is doing too little.
The President has many important accomplishments, including a deal that will delay and even cancel Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, a worldwide pact that will significantly reduce global warming, the Affordable Care Act that has provided health insurance for tens of millions of previously uninsured people, and others. So why are the voters angry?
I attribute the anger to what I perceive as the old tension between blue-collar workers, who are often less educated and lower paid, and better-off white-collar voters. It is nothing new. Even though white-collar liberals have always supported unions, better pay, better hours, and other improvements for blue-collar workers, that love rarely seems reciprocated. Blue-collar workers have long been angry. In the past they supported George Wallace, Lyndon LaRouche, Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot and others. So what’s new?
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