axordil wrote:One thing I think needs to be recognized by all parties involved is that globalization--really the crux of all the non-racist Leave arguments--is by its nature politically problematic. Its benefits are incremental and diffuse, while its costs are sudden and concentrated. It's a sort of reverse lottery you have no choice but to play, in which everyone gets a few bucks a week, except for a relative handful of people who lose everything to pay for it. Then the relative handfuls add up...and vote.
Yep. That.
This is a truth that never seems to get addressed because the easy solution, the one that earns fist bumps in the echo chambers, is to give everyone who disagree with your point of view a quick whack with the racist stick.
There's plenty of policies that gain traction on the principle that it does good for many and hurts only a few - and those can get pushed through individually because the people hurt by them are too few each time to make a difference. But once you push through enough of those the critical mass builds up and you get an unforeseen explosion that you really should have foreseen.
It is easy to be baffled and claim racism, for example, around the rise of Donald Trump. Even though I don't believe he plans to, or can, improve this, he found the thing that a big bloc of voters had in common: diminished prospects, a feeling of having been left behind in their own country - and he stoked the flames. Of course a bunch of his supporters are terrible racists, but all of them have something in common with every single voter: a desire to better their own plight and provide for the futures of their families. We all differ on how to achieve that, but remember that that is the motivating factor for most people as they choose to live their lives.
There's a big block of people whose skills and ability to make a living have been outsourced to countries with lower labor costs. The proposed solution: get an education! have saddled a generation with a heap of debt right out the gate. But the uncomfortable truth is that we are not all STEM specialists or college material. What does this country, and all countries, have to offer those people? You cannot expect them to vote for your interests or to vote for a future that excludes them.
I think that is where the political and in some cases the intellectual elite falls flat: they see the world only from their perspective. They don't understand what life is like when you are not in an ivory tower, and when they see dissent, the prism they view the world through has no answer other than that those dissenters are somehow "base", or uneducated, or bigoted ... and an easy way to disparage a white person who is angry because their job was outsourced to a poorer country ( where the population is often predominantly non-white, because that is how our terrible world is skewed ) is to call them racist.
Mark my words: to stop this kind of thing before it turns really, really ugly, every policymaker and politician and business interest needs to take a good look at what they offer and who they offer it to. The rich and the upper middle class is thriving like never before, but the middle class and working class is having a tough time of it. Politicians and policymakers are mostly upper middle class. They need to stick their heads outside of the bubble for a minute and see how the voters are doing. There is a bunch of people who will never vote for Hillary not because they are racist, but because they don't see how a supporter of globalization* and war** will do their futures any good.
A random thought on jobs: a lot of those problems could be solved quickly and simply if the political will is there. In particular, imagine what we can do if we invested in America's infrastructure. That would create some pretty well-paying unskilled jobs, and you can't outsource local construction very easily. Repair bridges. Build new ones if needed. Repair roads. Build rail to move goods. Work on the electrical grid. Of course, this requires spending, and the majority of representatives with an R behind their names apparently break out in hives when there's talk of spending ( on anything other than war, war, war, it sometimes seems ). America's business runs on infrastructure. I just don't see why that knee-jerk opposition is valid in this case.
-------
* Hillary supported TPP and supported NAFTA as well, but she's coming around on the cost of it and her recent statements are encouraging - if she plans to follow through on them. However, the thing that still sticks in people's minds is that she supported NAFTA. So she'll have to do a hell of a better job getting her message out there if she wants to change that.
** War is a tricky one. You can't ignore the way the world is now, and you have to carry on what others have started. The US can't just drop the mess that a quarter century or so of war has made.