Nobody ever accused Trump of avoiding hyperbole, and his inaugural address was no exception with a dark, dystopian picture of America in a state of carnage worthy of Mad Max. Unfortunately, his solution, like that of President Snow, may try to bring us relief by staging Hunger Games in which Americans are pitted against the world and each other.
No doubt a lot of cheering fans agreed with parts of his diagnosis. So did I. Our schools are not preparing students adequately for a changing world, too many neighborhoods are unsafe and too many families are struggling to get by with ill-paying menial, jobs. And hopeless, ill-educated, underemployed people may fall prey to gang violence or drug addiction.
But these are largely symptoms and not the cause. Clearly Washington is dysfunctional, the rich get richer and the poor are forgotten, jobs once done for a good wage by the working class are now outsourced to those willing to work for less, our infrastructure is neglected and our military has been downsized. But…
Washington may have collaborated in the process of decay and folly he cites, but a lot of its constituents egged it on. They wanted tax cuts and entitlements more than military spending and roads and bridges. And the donor class, people like him and his cabinet, lobbied Washington for trade deals, loopholes and perks that enriched them, but ignored the needs of working men and women. Often their jobs went elsewhere.
His “America First” solutions will not address the underlying problems. Union wages that made blue collar workers middle-class priced America out of the world labor market. Cutting taxes while simultaneously doling out vast sums for military adventures and entitlements has given us a gigantic debt and Trump promises more tax cuts and more spending on infrastructure and the military. That can’t end well. Addiction to debt is the road to ruin and the fiscal equivalent of the opioid epidemic.
But pie in the sky is easier to sell than hard truths. We became great by inventing, by facing the future, by being an engine of change in the 19th century’s industrial revolution and the 20th century’s shift to a silicon economy and miracle drugs. Big disruptions went along with the deal. Farmers were forced to leave the land for the factory, for instance. We are now in the midst of a so-called fourth industrial revolution that will usher in an era of AI, bioengineering, and clean energy. Trying to reverse the process, to bring back the Ford Assembly line and the coal miner of song “with a mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong,” isn’t going to be possible or desirable. The CEOs in his cabinet could tell him economies demand that you adapt or die.
The earlier revolutions also relied on immigrant brain power, men like Andrew Carnegie of Scotland and Andy Grove of Hungary. And today’s does too. Americans have won 42 percent of all Nobel Prizes for science, but 31 percent of those American winners were born in other countries. If President Alt-Right makes America inhospitable to immigrants and diversity, we won’t be great, we’ll lose the race to prosperity.
Furthermore, the stealing of jobs by foreign workers is changing. Trump is fighting offshoring when the real problems is increasingly what is being called no-shoring. That is, jobs once done by American (or Chinese or Indian) workers are now being done by American (or Chinese or Indian) machines. Christopher Mims in “The Wall Street Journal” quotes an automation executive explaining how a building large enough to house 600 people can now be “crushed down to one cabinet in the corner of a data center.” Good for the business and its overhead. Bad for the 600 employees. And no evil foreigners to blame.
This process is also what is called scalable. That means, you’re next. A McKinsey report quoted by Mims concludes that “49% of the time workers spend on their jobs could be supplanted by automation, using technology that exists.” That sounds a lot like half the workers are superfluous and will have to find something else to do. Instead of boldly meeting the future and ameliorating the pain of change by smart government actions, like reeducating our workforce, Trump wants to fight a war that was lost a generation or two ago.
Or maybe it is all just campaign rhetoric and he has no actual plans, other than making pretty promises while implementing policies that feather the nests of people like himself and his cabinet. Washington business as usual, that is. His vow to rescue the forgotten man doesn’t seem to jibe with his actual agenda. He plans to oppose the scourge of drugs and violence by closing the borders and locking up offenders. But drugs are now being synthesized at home (ask Walter White) and many of the offenders are doctors writing prescriptions.
He is apparently embracing Republican orthodoxy by seeking to ban and criminalize abortion and defund Planned Parenthood. But the lion’s share of its customers for reproductive health care are the women and families of his forgotten class. The prosperous can afford to get their reproductive health help from their boutique doctors and in the bad old days got their abortions in Europe.
Trump’s first under the radar act as President was to have his Justice Department petition the court to delay a decision in a Texas voter rights so a Trump brief on the opposite side from one by the Obama administration could be substituted. Do his forgotten men not deserve their voting rights, but Washington swamp dwellers deserve to have the votes of their foes suppressed?
And how does a hiring freeze on government employment help the forgotten man? Big taxpayers who fund a government they hate may like the idea, but many of the people who work for the government (or benefit from its programs or are protected by its regulations) are the kind of middle and working class people who do government jobs and will be the losers.
Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, famously said voters should “watch what we do, not what we say.” Of course, when they found out what they had been doing, Mitchell went to prison and Nixon was impeached. It now looks like the Trump strategy may be the opposite. “Watch what we say, not what we do.” We had better do both.