If You Were Right, John, Then Massachusetts Politics Would Have Turned This Strange Weird Trumpist Flavor Back in the 1950S
Note to Self: From Council on Foreign Relations: The Future of Democracy Symposium: Session Two: Economics, Identity, and the Democratic Recession: Look at me: Harvard Ph.D., Harvard B.A., Harvard B.A ancestors back to 1686 or whenever, Sidwell Friends School, and before that Cal Tech nursery school. But my wife grew up—first generation in her family to go to college—in a Portuguese neighborhood of Fall River, where everyone’s parents and grandparents worked in the textile mills. The textile mills of Fall River were stripped by Greensboro, North Carolina. They took the jobs away from the Portuguese millworker immigrants of Fall River. They stole that identity.
And their grandchildren are absolutely fine with that.
Their grandchildren are fine with being part of the Greater Boston Rootless Cosmopolite elite. They are they are grandchildren of millworkers. But they do not think that they want those jobs, that particular identity, back. They think they have Better jobs, and a new, better identity. If you were right, John, then Massachusetts politics would have turned this strange weird Trumpist flavor back in the 1950s and 1960s. It didn't. Why not?
Over 2001—2008 the furniture workers who had lost their jobs because of NAFTA and the China shock were getting new and better jobs in construction, building up Raleigh and Durham. Few unhappy about the economic transformation of the Carolinas until late 2008. Then, all of a sudden, it turned out that a great many securities rated AAA by Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s in fact had no business being sold to anyone at any price at all; the Democrats did not prioritize a return to full employment; and the Republicans prioritized a non-return to full employment in the hope of weakening a Democratic president. Economic anxiety producing racial cleavage, yes. But it was political decisions, not trade or even technology that done it.
#notetoself #politicaleconomy #orangehariedbaboons #globalization #technology #fascism
