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Originally Posted by butterfly
Interesting question, to say the least. I am reticent to put people in “class” buckets, but for the sake of argument, I’ll assume we are talking about people with high school educations who have jobs.
It may not be what they are saying, but perhaps what they aren’t saying that Trump is. I think he skewered Clinton at the debates by bringing up NAFTA and she had a difficult time parrying it. Which is fascinating to me, because Trumpism (such as it is) differs greatly from free market capitalism in that way. Protectionism benefits domestic producers and punishes domestic consumers, for an aggregate loss. But it does redistribute income to these newly (I’d argue, artificially) created jobs. And people see and feel that. He also didn’t want to repeal the ACA, instead arguing to replace it. He didn’t want to raise the retirement age for SSI and Medicare. He was very non interventionist with respect to foreign policy. He didn’t speak much about the debt - an esoteric macroeconomic concept for most of the people we are discussing and not something they see and feel.
They weren’t classic small government 2010s conservative American positions. In many ways he sounded like Ross Perot and changed the belief structure.
Here’s a map showing the swing from 2012 to 2016 by county.
He made gains in every county on the Canadian border, even, but for Whatcom (WA). I don’t believe the notion that these people turned from voting for Obama to Trump simply because of internet propaganda. The internet existed and had been widely adopted long before then. |
The aggregate loss is very much debatable. On the surface most people would feel that the access to a wide selection of cheap consumer goods is a net benefit. That perception is probably all that matters in this context, but I am not at all convinced that our present state of consumerism is actually a net benefit to our overall QOL.
As for the internet, social media took a pretty dark turn in the early 2010s. Social media had plenty of harms before then, but it was around this time it really started to break brains.