Bannon is gone. Markets are reacting favorably. Well, of course they are given that he was the only person who at least somewhat opposed fluidity.
The real tragedy is that the Left (Democrats, progressives, call them what you may) has embraced fluidity and left the field of opposing it to freak shows like Bannon.
Now that Trump has retracted his meaningless little flirtation with anti-globalism, he will proceed to ride the wave of liquefaction like he always wanted.
Too early to tell. Let’s see how Breitbart reacts to this over the next few days or weeks. If they’re really pissed, we can infer the firing was real. If not, it may just be a soft landing, and Bannon could still be advising him from outside the white house.
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Whither Bernie?
Also when was Trump anti-globalist? It’s farcical given what we knew of his business ties before the election. If “money talks, and bullshit walks” he has chosen to manufacture as many Trump branded manufactured stuff in China as humanly possible. What kind of “anti-globalist” does this? Also I have real difficulty discerning what specific, if any, trade proposals, this administration or Bannon has attempted to effect that would result in hiring more Americans instead using robots or foreigners. What anti-globalist puts in Betsy DeVos, who basically wants to dismantle public education? As you’ve said before public education is one of the crowning achievements of the nation state. Frankly, a lot of his supporters are nostalgic for good paying jobs so I don’t know what to make of someone who says wages are too high. He has used every opportunity to enrich his overseas businesses from which he has not divested at all. Real “anti-globalists” would have problems with all of this.
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Bernie, as we all know, was not supported by the working classes of any race. Bernie was supported either by the very young or by the very educated, that is, the most highly mobile groups in the population.
Half of professors over here had Bernie stickers. And not a single plumber, handyman, waitress, etc. But the more multilingual, well-traveled, mobile one is, the more they were pro Bernie.
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Bernie was supported either by the very young or by the very educated, that is, the most highly mobile groups in the population.
Half of professors over here had Bernie stickers. And not a single plumber, handyman, waitress, etc. But the more multilingual, well-traveled, mobile one is, the more they were pro Bernie
See, that’s why it’s very odd to me, on the surface to frame the current political movements in terms of globalism vs anti globalism — at least in the United States.
You can’t really argue that people are coherently responding to that when you look at the candidates who won the primaries, Donald Trump and “neoliberal” Hillary Clinton.
If anything the multilingual, well traveled, mobile should’ve not liked Bernie very much because he proposed massive penalties for the fluidity of capital, whether it was for companies sending jobs overseas or people putting extra cash into the stock market.
I feel very anomalous as I’m neither very young, very educated, very mobile or very multilingual (perhaps it’s a function of the bubble I’m in.)
Perhaps it’s just that 99% of people just aren’t there yet.
As I’ve said several times the median income of a Trump voter was something like $70,000 — which is by no means poor. People with high school educations have great difficulty making that kind of money unless they have a trade or they own their own business (which again requires capital.) Maybe that doesn’t track perfectly with being working class (as plumbers and people in the trades can make that much), but it’s a good indication.
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Of course, Trump isn’t a real anti globalist. Of course, he was faking. But here is the question: if people are so starved for the recognition that fluidity is not easy for everyone that they’d buy Trump as an anti globalist, what prevented the Democrats to at least fake? At least put on a show of understanding the difficulty?
They would rather lose and lose and lose than do it, though. And that’s what is really interesting.
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In my street, the house across the street is owned by a steel worker. Two houses down is the house of the cashier at the local supermarket. Next door is a fellow from the sheriff’s office. I can’t even remotely imagine any of them considering voting for Bernie. He’s from a different planet.
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See, I really don’t think people think of it in those terms. If I asked anyone outside of this blog who the anti-globalist candidate was, I’d be met with a blank stare. If you’re not even at the point of conceptualizing it, how can you be voting in terms of globalism?
Half the country doesn’t even think the democratic process is an integral part of this nation state, let alone bother to even know basic civics or democratic norms.
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Of course, articulating things is a task for the fortunate few. 🙂 You are right, most people don’t know they speak in prose and wouldn’t be able to diagnose their malady. But they know it hurts. I think that just a simple recognition that the hurt is there and that it’s not an unreasonable thing to experience it would go a long way.
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Instead, we are seeing a movement that’s so dogmatic, so unforgiving that it repels even very progressive people like reader Fie or reader xyqademiqs. If even they feel uncomfortable, how are the cashier or the steelworker supposed to feel?
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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