No More Flyover Country
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Esther Bubley Waiting for Greyhound bus trip from Memphis to Louisville, KY 1943 Been scribbling several some post-election notes over the past
[See the full post at: No More Flyover Country]I strongly suspect that Trump’s change will not amount to any more than Obama’s. I would be happy to be proven wrong. No change will play out with massive amounts of new money printing, the continued expansion of the power and reach of corporations and the linkedin corporate hierarchies at the expense of citizens and the same if not even more direct military action against ‘terrorism’.
I understood the basic common sense of many of Trump’s ideas but thought the huge amount of nonsense ideas negated them. A huge swath of the alt economic world have hinged their hopes that the basic ideas will see the light of day. We will see.
If Trump is such a great “persuader”, why didn’t he simply persuade everyone, including the angry, that America was never going to be great again, that the era of growth was over, and that everyone had better get used to having less stuff to buy at Walmart and less money to buy it with? He didn’t because you can’t be persuasive about something you don’t believe or understand.
I agree with you that resource depletion is gradually calling a halt to the end of the growth of the global market economy, but I have grave doubts that Trump understands any of that. I take him at his word, which in the light of the reality we are facing, is complete nonsense. He won’t build the wall. He won’t provide high paying manufacturing jobs as America once again becomes the export powerhouse it was in the ’50s and ’60s. He won’t cut taxes dramatically and watch a giant growth spurt balance the budget. Trump doesn’t have a clue.
You seem to think (as I do too) that since the world economy must re-localize and shrink, bringing all production closer to the people who use it, that Trump’s anti-trade tirades will somehow make it happen. What will make it happen is dire necessity, the inevitable result of decreasing resources per capita and the resulting inability to keep a hyper-complex, world-wide economy functioning.
I agree that Trump tapped into a great deal of anger. Unfortunately, he will not be able to do anything to assuage that anger; it will only grow and grow as things fall apart. When he runs for re-election, he will have even more anger to pander to and he will be good at finding some group to blame for all of it.
Using anger as part of one’s “sales pitch” is extremely risky. It is almost impossible to turn off anger once it passes a certain threshold. It may be that that threshold has been passed. Rather than being a cause for hope that something good will come out of America’s angry reaction to the decline we face, Trump’s election is a harbinger of a dangerous and fear-inducing future to come.
Not so sure Trumps election victory had as much to do with anger as it did being the outcome of a feeling of hopelessness among a wide swath of disenfranchised middle class law abiding working Americans.
I might have used the term “frustrated” in place of “angry.”
Raul,
The people chosen to run the new administration will tell you all you need to know about the direction to be taken. So far it doesn’t look good. If John Bolton is selected for any position your relief about avoiding war is way off. Same crap, different shovel. only possibly worse. IMHO
Professor LNL,
In my rural neck of the woods, and I am as rural as they come, the somewhat prevalent opinion was: We put up with 8 years of that AFRICAN and we’re not about to let them shove that haughty WOMAN down our throats. Not so much fear as the want for revenge. People are not as nice as we would like to think. I am not a Hillary fan or voter.
I no longer have very much to say. I just want my circle of life to look at what is happening and to prepare to avoid being destroyed.
How could you get so many things right about the Middle East, mention Saudi Arabia, Yemen and so on, without mentioning a single time the role of Israel?
Are the Dutch programmed from a young age to believe that Zionists are automatically exonerated from any crimes? 9/11, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon etc.
Who do you think is the main beneficiary of the destruction of all the countries near Israel? Who mainly carried out the looting of Russia and Ukraine? Is it the truth taboo?
Well Ilargi; you pretty much nailed it, IMO.
My take meshes with yours about 99%.
IMO, everybody should just calm the hell down and see what transpires.
Genuine change is painful and scary.
As the Buddhist monk said regarding the future is: We’ll see…We in the Western World are so good at dancing around the Truth. People living for many generations on islands learn a basic truth. Populations can not continue to grow without meeting limits. The results have always been various means to limit population to that which can be supported by the available resources. Humanity lives on an island called Eearth, in the sense that all our resources are ultimately limited and, sooner or later, both locally and on a global scale, population growth must cease. That the prevailing thinking from our political and economic “leaders” refuse to admit this basic truth can only result in population growing beyond sustainable levels, leading to the most brutal paths to lower levels.
We’ve been able to get by thanks to our exploitation of cheap fossils fuels, but the time will come when we can no longer continue to ignore reality. In so many ways, the Trump campaign represents an appeal to those who do not understand or accept these truths, as the voters cast their ballots to continue Business as Usual. The anti-abortion Fundamentalist zealots, the pro-growth CEI/Koch brothers and the anti-EPA crowd have won a hollow victory and we can only hope the Trumpetistas will burnout quickly before the wrong button is pushed and mega deaths result…
Nassim
The anti-truth is..or rather was..politically correct. Political correctness given human nature is unfortunately a tool not for equality but one that can give minorities power to exercise hubris and superiority. Humans are strange creatures.E Swanson,
Not only do we get by on the exploitation cheap fossil fuels (getting less cheap to produce, notwithstanding the current low price for consumers), but we now need debt to rise faster than income. We need both of these phenomena to continue if we want to avoid considering a different future.Excellent analysis Raúl.
On-target, relevant, and, with time, historical.
Amazing. I wish that your wisdom and insight could be communicated to the American people. But, such are the times we live in.
Thank you.
Thanks Raul. You did a good job of providing perspective. As a former regional planner, I have seen local and state government work for the people. General Federal policy was another matter, though working with the Senators and Congressman was very important for our region. That was in the 1990s.
The inherent falsity of the policies then seemed to hide the errors of the 1950s Cold War policies which we’d learn about. Neoliberals and neocons have given us this world, one that recently figured out that sustainability would be a good idea, though it is so depleted that, at best, strong mitigation can break the fall due to global pollution, manifest in part by climate disruption.
I felt Clinton was safer, even though an Eisenhower Republican. I did appreciate President-Elect Trump demonstrating that the other candidates and the Republican Party had nothing. Being from the Midwest, I’d watched the decline from Virginia where I stayed after doing my Navy enlistment, experiencing another version of it here.
You say: “This transition is the one away from economic growth and globalization -centralization in general- and towards smaller, less centered and grandiose, politics and markets.”
The challenge for the world will be downsizing “great”. It has been underway for longer than most suspect. That is a source of anger for the people that did everything right and after all these years have little to show for it. If their children went to college to move up, they may be highly in debt and not moving at all.
I don’t think “flyover country” is the problem, but “Metropolitan Obsession” is. This is where national economic policy has been failing non-metro people for decades. The metros, on the other hand have many on the economic margin due to high housing cost, long commutes and wage stagnation.
I think your proposition is correct: “The question then becomes: would America be a better, or a safer, place if the entire angry part of its population had again, and still, been ignored by everyone? Or is it better to have them gathered under the umbrella of Donald Trump? Take your pick. Don’t be shy.”
I pick “better”. America has many elites. They all have their own ideals; ideals that blind them.
President Trump is not likely to change the Republican Party elites which do not share his values, but if his supporters stick with him, and perhaps grow, because many who did not vote, in effect voted for him, he might be able to pull back from the New Cold War, diversify the economy away from the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex and establish secure borders, so illegal immigrants can no longer be used to undercut wages – as has been done for the last 30+ years,
Odds are he won’t be able to be a one-man revolution and that he’ll be co-opted or otherwise constrained. Non-cooperation of the corporate elites is powerful. Still, the ultimate outcome can not be avoided. There are a lot of hills/mountains from which there must be ‘come down’ moments.
The president-elect will now need the same skills in order to ‘come down that mountain’ without antagonizing each and every side of the discussion, of the nation. He’ll have to convince the liberal camp that he didn’t mean everything he said in a literal sense, while at the same time keeping his ‘angry mob’ satisfied that he will do enough of what he promised them.
I’m not sure why that’s the case. That assumes Trump wants to govern, and he wants to govern the majority of the populace. I don’t see clear evidence that is the case.
I agree with the general comments that we can’t assume how Trump will govern based on his hate- and fear-stoking campaign. But there are clear warning signs in the formation of his advisors and names being floated for cabinet positions. Yes, he’s a wild card. And that may be both the greatest concern and greatest opportunity to break the status quo. But he’s also woefully ignorant of how government and governance work and so will quickly surround himself by so-called expert advisors. There’s a void there that will likely be filled by the military-industrial complex (which is very good at scaring/keep elected officials in line) and his stupid friends like Rudy Giuliani.
The other thing that we can likely assume is that 1) Trump will be as corrupt in office as he’s been outside of it; 2) he will try to deregulate as much as he can; and 3) he sees the environment as the equivalent of a golf course. All of these are deeply worrisome.
All that said, those of us who understood that Limits to Growth were inevitable and upon us saw that there was a high probability of disruptive events. So we can’t be too surprised with this outcome.
Automatic Earth has been predicting Trump for at least 5 years now. If you’ve been a long-time reader, you were not at all surprised by Trump. A shift towards local vs global, increased sentiments of protectionism, rejection of establishment. All of this has been explained by The Automatic Earth since I started reading in 2010.
Of course all those shifts can be negative…but they can also be positive. And ironically, despite all the hair-pulling and clutching at pearls, Trump is far, far, far more positive than many of the alternatives could have been.
Because as the global unwind gathers pace, more such seismic political shifts will take place, and some of those truly will be dangerous and authoritarian.
Thankfully Trump is not those things. Yes, he is “protectionist”. Yes, he is “populist”. But he’s far more progressive than the Left are willing to give him credit for.
Trump is a necessary correction. I’d rather have a benign “necessary correction” than an evil one.
I’m relieved to have Trump. He’s a positive example for other such regime changes coming elsewhere in the world. But he really has inherited the poisoned chalice. I think he knows it too. That’s called sacrifice.
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