He boils down his analysis to somewheres and anywheres. Your an anywhere and you find fault with the some wheres. I’m shocked to find gambling going on here.
America has only one governing principle: free contract. That means bargaining power is everything. What you earn is a function of that.
Here’s the problem: anywhere’s are policy and economic elites. They’ve been trading away jobs and allowing foreigners to enter the country all of which undermines the bargaining power of workers and undermines the stability of their communities and families.
When I was 17 (1977) I got a summer job as unskilled construction labor that paid $20 an hour. That’s at least $80 an hour in today’s money. Now part of the reason unskilled construction labor was paid so high was because they couldn’t expect to work all the time. But it allowed them to live something close to a middle class existence, house, clothes, feed and educate their families. That kind of social contract did not destroy America - in fact it made it great, it made it a great country. The America I grew up in was a far and distant country which I have fond memories of. That country was destroyed by elites who shipped jobs overseas and flooded America with immigrants driving down the lifestyles of working class America. Remember it’s their country too. They do most of the fighting (when there’s war) dying and working in the country. They have a right to rising expectations for the future (as we all do). My father was a talented machinery maintenance supervisor for a large brewery, a role similar to Michelle Obama’s father’s, and similarly paid, then $55,000, today that’s $255,000. Meanwhile I have 15 years as a highly skilled business analyst designing information systems for large heavy manufacturing companies and a law degree from a tier 1 university, yet I spent over a decade nominally employed, lost everything and only recently gained anything close to decent employment, and I must say the America work place today is a massive stressfest because, among other things, losing your job means no insurance and so people are increasingly neurotic in the workplace. All of my experience, training and education nets me a job that pays less than I made as an unexperienced unskilled construction worker in high school. That’s what I’ve gone through, I can’t be sure what’s happened to others, but I can see the working class on my visits to Walmart and they are positively broken, broken by the anywhere’s that run the country.
Obama created 10 million jobs. But during the Obama administration 10 million people immigrated into the United States - legally. 10 million legal immigrants. (I don’t have a problem with illegal immigrants, I have a problem with excessive legal immigration). In a country without enough jobs for the people who live there already. Why? It wasn’t the somewheres who live in local communities, it was the anywheres creating public policy.
This is the thing that broke this election. One of my friends parents are doctors. They have a good union. When I was a kid his father made only about 30% more than my dad. But doctors have a strong union. They have maintained their bargaining power and maybe enhanced it. Doctors make huge amounts of money - because they have bargaining power. There are no factory maintenance supervisors making $300,000 a year these days. In the 70s it was common place and its what created the middle class. By flooding America with immigrants we are undermining the bargaining power of the working class that already lives here, our friends and neighbors. By shipping jobs overseas, we are doing the same. At some point you can’t expect these people to fight and die for a country that has impoverish them. At that point the country isn’t a country anymore. Trump made that point tons of times on the campaign trail saying “we aren’t a country anymore”.
BigMoney types are anywhere types. Hillary was one of them. Hillary didn’t care about working people, about manufacturing, about the life bread that sustains communities. She knew and the working people knew it. That made them easy pickings for Trump. She didn’t even visit places like Wisconsin. She hoped a coalition of identity minority voters would give her a majority. And it would if she had had any credibility at all with the working class - but Minorities are still, ahem, minorities and election wins require a majority. Now I see she is having second thoughts about going away, perhaps wants a third bite at the apple. Good grief. If she got a job in a factory then I might think about it.
Give me Bernie. Give me demand side bias economic policy bias. Stop shipping jobs overseas. Stop shipping more immigrants here than we can absorb. Remember, all politics is local, or at least it used to be.