The Democrats ran a campaign that was basically anti-Trump and pro-Women. But it failed to answer the fears of the white working class.
Yes the white working class are basically illiterate (54% of the American people have poor literacy compared to 16.4% in the UK) but that does not mean that they do not have real fears.
a. They are terrified of becoming a minority in their own country (I know, they stole it from the Native Americans but they still think of it as their own) as the populations of black and brown people increase.
b. They are in a precarious work situation as their traditional jobs in oil, car manufacture, steel, coal and factories either is done by robots, has been shunted abroad to cheap labour, or is being shut down because it is outdated or polluting.
c. The new industries in green technology seems too sophisticated. They do not think they have the skills to change.
d. The agriculture industry takes in cheap labour from immigrants.
e. Education and careers for women reduces white fertility rates. Trump was offering to get women out of education and jobs and back into the home. Educated women are threatening.
f. Their incomes have dropped and they are living in poverty.
g. They are worried about immigrants flooding in, taking their jobs and displacing them.
The Democrats simply ignored all these fears. Wrote them off as racist. Offered no solutions and failed to address the issues.
Trump, MAGA, the Evangelical Right and all their billionaire sponsors – 183 of them – addressed these issues head on.
a. They focused on building a wall to keep immigrants out.
b. They promised to deport millions.
c. They promised to scrap all the green energy. Spread conspiracy about climate change. Undermined science. Spread disinformation and promised to bring back coal, oil and fracking, protect the old jobs.
d. They promised to bung tariffs on all imports and force companies back to the US to keep jobs.
e. They promised to reduce income tax and give people more money in their pockets (the fact that this vastly favoured the wealthy and destroys schools, police, health and infrastructure was glossed over).
f. They made a huge fuss about abortion and contraception (go forth and multiply) playing to the extreme right Christian Evangelists.
g. They want to dumb down schools for the poor (the wealthy can go private) so that the populace can’t think, girls get pregnant and don’t get careers. The fertility rate rockets. They will not be replaced.
The poor whites thought this addressed all their concerns:
a. Mass immigration would be stopped.
b. The black/brown population would be reduced by mass deportation.
c. Their old jobs would be revived.
d. They would not be as poor.
e. They would not be replaced and become a minority.
Trump and Maga offered them a vision of a positive future.
The fact that this is all short-term bullshit was irrelevant, very expensive and highly unfeasible it might be but it seemed to tackle the issues. The fact that the old industries were defunct and well past their sell-by date; the new green industries were the future whether they liked it or not; that the tax cuts merely put billions in the pockets of the wealthy and gave next to nothing in their own; the decline of schools, health, infrastructure and policing was a future disaster waiting to happen; the wall was massively expensive and doomed to failure; the policies would add trillions to the national debt. The tariffs would promote trade wars and plunge the world into a disastrous slump.
They weren’t clever enough, educated enough or farsighted enough to see this. They could not see the flaws only the simplistic vision. They could not see they were being played by the billionaires who were going to make a killing.
MAGA and Trump offered a bright future, a vision, that they bought into without seeing the maggots in the apple.
The Democrats did not even address the issues!