I awoke on Saturday to the last minute of the weekly NPR program “Left Right and Center”. The program’s host, Josh Barrow, concluded with these comments:
The policy results of the past 20 years have been a little bit humbling. Free trade and free markets … hasn’t delivered the individual level results that people were expecting. And especially, it has created a lot of disruption that I think we didn’t take seriously enough as a problem in itself. We sort of have this attitude, well the economy changes and things change and factories close and other factories open and people go get new jobs.
And over the long run, a large amount of that is inevitable and we need to make sure that the economy is resilient. But we also need to understand that people don’t always want to change. They like the town they live in. They like what they do for a living. They want to be able to train for a job and work in that industry until they retire without the industry evaporating in front of them.
So we need to be more mindful, not just about economic institutions, but institutions in general. Things that cause things people depend on to wither away and die can create real instability and real chaos in society. And people can act out their reaction to that chaos by electing somebody like Donald Trump.
I think this brilliantly describes how we got here. Both parties have been in league to destroy these institutions, in service to the giant multi-nationals that have zero allegiance to America and often don’t even pay any significant taxes here.
We can talk climate change. We can talk about women’s reproductive rights. We can talk about LGBT and BLM. We can talk about all of those things, but it is the core issue that Barrow so eloquently described that put us in this position.
The Republicans are at least as complicit as Democrats in creating this problem — arguably more so. But the fact is the Tea Party got an early start in disrupting the GOP, which created the opportunity for a demagogue like Trump to take advantage. And the Dems completely missed the mark by running a candidate whose husband is forever linked with NAFTA at the same time the candidate herself was way too late and way too little with opposition to the next stage in that assault — the TPP.
Progressives will not win by focusing on the fringe issues when we don’t uphold the CENTRAL Democratic principles.
