How did Trump happen?

Originally posted here in 2016. Painful how true this remains in 2024.

A few generations ago, a man with a HS diploma could get a job at a factory, support a family, a house, a car, and a vacation every year. And those were good times (as long as you were a white male.) Times that are (in some ways) worthy to be missed.

And then the world changed. We moved from a manufacturing age to an information age. Even factory jobs required advanced training due to automation and computerized control. The economy globalized. The politics of regions half-way across the planet started having direct and immediate impact on what happens here.

Gone were those glory days, and they are never coming back — at least not without nuclear fallout being involved.

One party recognized this, and attempted to push America into this new age with the tools and focus needed to compete. One party did not, and started getting angry about the loss.

• The democrats focused on the higher education needed for workers to compete. They identified that without a basic understanding of science and technology, Americans would fall (and have fallen) behind our other first world competitors in all forms of new development. For this, conservatives called them “elites”.
• Democrats focused on exploiting this new world trade paradigm that has and will continue to be the norm (again, assuming no global collapse). Conservatives called this “abandonment”.
• Democrats focused on bringing the quality of life, safety, and health of Americans to the same level that our allies were using to out-compete us for human resources. Conservatives called this “entitlement”.
• Democrats attempted to take plays from other countries that had stronger economies, stronger manufacturing, and happier populations. Conservatives called this “socialism”.

And the conservatives got really, really mad.

At the same time, politics stopped being seen as “agreeing, and often compromising, in order to enact the policies that (as best as possible) reflected the majority opinion of The People.” It turned instead into a football game, where one “picks a side” and starts screaming obscenities at “other”.

At some point, politics became less about coming to hard decisions — and more about “winning at all costs”. This meant that if you didn’t have the votes to get “what you wanted” — you changed the rules. Or if a law was passed that you didn’t like, you created a different law that simply made the first impossible to enforce, or tried to remove all money from the budget so that the law couldn’t be enacted.

So then — this was the environment in which Trump ran. Angry, divided, hurt people who thought winning was the goal — not governance. Many people had not yet come to terms with the fact that the jobs, economy, and world that they loved had evolved and was never coming back. We had large swaths of the population who didn’t understand even the basics of science, or how to discern fact from wishful thinking.

And Trump knew this. And played America like a fiddle. He got the angry even angrier. He promised to raise the dead America like Jesus raised Lazarus. He pointed at “the other” (Hillary, immigrants, elites) and cursed them as the devil.

Trump spoke to people’s anger, loss, sadness, and denial — and they gobbled it up like the starving at a banquet.