Democrats Should Take Heed - Trumps Red Wave Is No Blip

Democrats Should Take Heed - Trump’s Red Wave Is No Blip
Ali Reza Naraghi
Huffington Post

A Reuters/Ipsos poll of more than 10,000 people conducted on election day found that 72% of Americans believe “the American economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful.” Bernie Sanders’s theme was a “political revolution” against the “billionaires and oligarchs” with the aim of creating a nation of social and economic justice, yet he was written off by the Democratic Party’s elite as a single-issue candidate.

The unemployment rate may be dropping, but positive trends don’t reflect the pain Americans continue to feel. New data indicate that median family income is lower now than it was in January 2000. Put bluntly, the gains of the economic recovery have been beneficial to those at the top; for everybody else, it practically stood still.

The truth is that America has become a country of deepening inequality. Today, 45 million Americans live in poverty. For many disillusioned Americans, the sense of a corporate takeover of American democracy is real, and they blame both parties for it. According to a 2015 Gallup poll, only 29% of Americans identify as Democrats, while 42% consider themselves to be independents.

From the start of the 2016 election cycle, Clinton’s campaign refused to acknowledge the plight of the American working class. To them, “America never stopped being great.” But, it’s not great — far from it. Vast rural areas are withering away, leaving behind trails of economic wastelands. A few people, like Chris Arnade, closely tracked the urban-rural divide and how the loss of dignity was fueling a wave of despair in the form of the opioid epidemic.

The article's central thesis is sound, though it's a mistake to call Trump's victory a "red wave". By the vote counts and the exit polls, it seems that this is less a victory for Trump than a rejection of Clinton by the Obama coalition. The margin is really in who didn't come out for Clinton, not who came out for Trump.

Regardless of the margins (or the irrelevant popular vote), it is incumbent upon the party to take this criticism to heart. Trump in many ways ran to Clinton's left on economic justice, granted solely rhetorically. Anyone who believes anything he says is not only a fool, but not paying attention to the fact that he often contradicts himself within the same sentence.

Even though Trump is an accomplished liar, he's playing the populist in the media. As much as we know that Trump's Carrier deal is not a sustainable way, to reinvigorate the country's manufacturing base, make no mistake that people will remember that Trump did save some jobs from being outsourced, and is talking about outsourcing at a time when Democrats are viewed as a party of free trade and deindustrialization.

The Party must not only create a coherent message for economic justice, it must actually become a party of economic justice. The idea that we've ceded this territory to Donald Trump, even in empty rhetoric, is a disgrace.