I was going to write a version of this post during the interregnum between Administrations no matter which presidential candidate won the recent election, but President-Elect Donald Trump’s clear victory over Vice President Kamala Harris brought the issue I have been pondering into immediate relief.
Americans are afraid of the future.
I would submit that Mr. Trump’s manifest wide support – even if he hadn’t won – demonstrates a fundamental reversal in the American spirit, an indication of a visceral if not cognitive understanding on the part of a decisive segment of our people of the uniquely American danger they face, brought on by our own success over the last quarter of a millennium with its attendant rising expectations: they lack the capability to perform at the level necessary to maintain the traditional American lifestyle. They’re not fools; they know it. They fear it. I would submit that this group of citizens has embraced Mr. Trump, despite his obvious failings, because he provides them the illusion that he can turn back the clock to a simpler time in which they can still compete — a reversal of the American ethos trumpeted by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan.
Let’s start with my profession. The fictional Attorney Perry Mason first appeared in 1934. All fans of the novels or the television series will well recall Mr. Mason’s secretary, Della Street; but Mr. Mason also employed Gertie, the receptionist/switchboard operator. The novels have multiple scenes of Mr. Mason dictating to Ms. Street taking shorthand in his office while Gertie was in the outside area to answer the phone. That said, in the real world, over time Mr. Mason would have gotten a dictation machine – the newfangled invention is a key component of the solution to Agatha Christie’s classic 1926 mystery, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – and then, he wouldn’t have needed to consume Ms. Street’s time with taking dictation; she could be out front, greeting clients, answering the phone, and transcribing dictated tapes … and Gertie, unless she had or could acquire other skills of commensurate economic value, would have been out of a “good-paying” job. You know where this is going: with the advent of voicemail, the personal computer, email, and word processing software, Mr. Mason would be receiving most of his messages technologically and doing most of his own transcription; the services he would then need from Ms. Street would be significantly more sophisticated for her to maintain her “good-paying” job. Two different types of fallout occur here: not all previously satisfactorily-performing secretaries would have the raw ability to discharge these more sophisticated responsibilities, and thus would no longer earn “good” wages; and over time, as Mr. Mason and any potential associate he hired further leveraged technologies to conduct their practices, they would need only one sophisticated assistant, putting a second out of work. (Lawyers themselves are certainly not immune; when I started, young lawyers were sent to the library to do research and draft legal memos for their seniors; now Artificial Intelligence can provide senior lawyers probably as good or better results at a fraction of the time and per-project cost.)
In 1914, Henry Ford enticed farmers to work in his plants with the offer of the unheard-of wage of $5/day. Being a farmer is hard – it requires many different skills. The vast majority of farmers who left the fields for Mr. Ford’s jobs were undoubtedly vastly over-qualified for the tasks he assigned them, but the phenomenal money was the ticket to the middle-class lifestyle. Now, we face the opposite reality: machines ever-increasingly perform the repetitive tasks that traditionally afforded “good paying” jobs to Americans who lack the wherewithal to perform more sophisticated tasks affording wages now necessary to support the traditional American lifestyle.
And again: You will recall the recent strike by the International Longshore Workers Union, in which the organization demanded not only wage increases but a management agreement not to employ automation to take their jobs. (I think the automation issue is still outstanding.) My reaction: in the long run, the Longshoremen might as well jump in unison into the Atlantic Ocean, and thrust their palms seaward: they’ll stand a better chance of holding back the sea than they will technology.
Obviously the least relevant to the vast majority of us, but still indicative of our current state: “The average speed of a four-seam fastball in Major League Baseball (MLB) today is 94.2 miles per hour. … In 2022, the average fastball speed was 93.6 miles per hour. … [In] 2002 … the average fastball speed was around 89 miles per hour.” (The irony is that I can’t even cite a source for this; it was an “AI Overview” generated in response to my Google search.) Judging by trends, you’d have to guess that in 1980, the mid-80s was a decent major league fastball. Although not many of us have been or aspired to be major league hitters, it would seem that a hitter who 40 years ago could hit a fastball in the 80s could be a well-compensated major leaguer even if he perhaps struggled to hit heat in the 90s; today, unless he has other skills, that same individual is coaching high school baseball at a fraction of a major league salary.
All of us saw clips of Ms. Harris declaring on the stump, “We won’t go back.” Although I think her primary meaning was a rejection of an America dominated by the male, white, straight, and Christian, to many of our people worried by the future, it could also have meant a more fundamental kind of threat, because they intuitively and cognitively recognize that their only hope to maintain the traditional American lifestyle is to go back to what worked – what was safe – in the past. They’ve turned to Mr. Trump.
I recently noted in these pages that the majority of our forebears (aside from Native Americans and those brought here in chains) affirmatively marched into the future, risking everything to start a new life here. That spirit created a very large share of the advances humankind uses today, from the automobile to the light bulb to the airplane to the smart phone. But while Americans’ entrepreneurial spirit has made us great creators, the progress of these achievements has over time made it increasingly difficult for a growing segment of our less-talented citizens to match the material expectations that have accompanied these American accomplishments. During travel in our latter years, we have seen the lifestyle of the average Mexican, the average Cambodian, the average Dominican, the average Brazilian, the average Kenyan; even if we haven’t seen we can imagine the lifestyle of the average Chinese. The general populace in these nations may lack the capability to create technical innovations, but they obviously have the manual skills to efficiently recreate them in return for wages sufficient to maintain a reasonable standard of living in their respective nations but wildly insufficient to maintain an acceptable standard of living in ours. The irrefutable fact that immigrants will do jobs in this country that native-born Americans won’t demonstrates the distinct difference in perspective and expectation. Our youngest son, the most widely traveled in our family, has observed to me on more than one occasion that Third World poor have objectively less than most American poor, but are significantly happier. I would submit that it is because their expectations are so much lower.
Maybe there was a time when we could have done something about the fact that the progress of American life was beginning to outpace an increasing number of our citizens’ ability to meet their material expectations; maybe not. The first instances of outsourcing began in the 1970s, Republicans’ belief in unfettered international free trade (later also embraced by Democrats) accelerated the process in the 1980s, and TLOML and I recently attended a talk in which the speaker asserted that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, served as the true death knell for much of American manufacturing. Assuming that one accepts the speaker’s assertion, Mr. Clinton, as bright as he is, certainly didn’t recognize the impact that NAFTA would have on the American factory worker. I’ve heard any number of pundits note how many of Mr. Trump’s base voted for President Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012. This may be unfair, but one must consider whether the charismatic Mr. Obama was not these voters’ last hope – The Audacity of Hope; “Yes, We Can” — and when it turned out that No, We Couldn’t, they were receptive to Mr. Trump’s dark message of American carnage. When Mr. Trump proved so unsavory and incompetent in his first term, a barely decisive segment was willing to turn back to President Joe Biden, an unquestionably good man and longtime friend of American workers. Since many of these Biden voters apparently believe, rightly or wrongly, that he failed them, they returned to Mr. Trump.
[With the benefit of hindsight, query whether the belief of a notable segment of Americans in the promise of America didn’t expire during Mr. Obama’s time in office, when so many of our citizens never truly recovered from the Great Recession. I have pondered whether he put his chips on the wrong issue in his first term when he went all in for health care. Notwithstanding the much societal good that the now-very-popular Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) has provided, I will venture that if required to choose, the vast majority of us would prioritize a good paying job over good health care benefits. In the first two years of his presidency, should Mr. Obama have championed, instead of healthcare, an aggressive jobs act and apprenticeship programs to accompany the financial institution bailout effected to preserve our economic system? (But if so, what skills would have been chosen to emphasize? At whom would the training have been directed? Would those at whom it was directed participated? With the advance of technology, would any such targeted occupations still afford “good” wages today?) Although Mr. Biden is a good man, one could argue that even he has engaged in palliative sophism, regularly referring to the “good paying” manufacturing jobs that will result if America takes the lead in “green energy” technology. While we certainly have the capability to design cutting edge green technologies, it will take the less-developed world virtually no time to figure out how to manufacture anything we develop at less cost than it can be manufactured in America.]
I have – clearly obliviously and arrogantly — thought that college-educated Americans have in recent elections broken so heavily for Democrats because they were willing to recognize reality – the truth about Mr. Trump – while Trump supporters actively refused to accept it. While there is certainly some validity to that – some MAGAs willingly gobble up the distorted reality spewed at them by Fox News and other alt-right media outlets, despite having (at least up to now) an ample opportunity to discover a closer approximation of reality by digesting a blend of news sources — what may be a more accurate perception of the American majority’s return to Mr. Trump, despite all of his obvious flaws, is that the American college-educated minority is largely financially satisfactorily-fixed, and thus can literally afford to contemplate issues of democracy, equality, and the rule of law, while many in the non-college-educated majority generally cannot afford such a luxury. The decisive segment in the last election was arguably not motivated by cultural issues, but by survival. They are financially drowning. When you’re drowning and in need of a lifeboat, you don’t care about Climate Change, the fate of minorities or faraway peoples, or the fact that the lifeboat captain who says he will throw you a life preserver is an unsavory liar, bully, and racial bigot; you want the life preserver. You also don’t pause to consider whether the preserver he offers actually has any buoyancy.
Although America has unquestionably bestowed more good on downtrodden countries than any other nation in the history of the world, perhaps we never were as generous, as magnanimous, as we liked to think we were. Maybe we just had, relative to the rest of the world, first a lot of land, and then a lot of money. If we were more generous, more magnanimous, we are no longer. If this is a criticism, it is also a self-criticism — I certainly do NOT suggest that my focus is not and has not always been first on the wellbeing of my family – but it is nonetheless a painful realization.
Mr. Trump promises his supporters that he will return them to a time in which not only — as the lyrics of All in the Family’s theme song, “Those Were the Days,” impart — “Girls were girls and men were men,” but also: to (figuratively) bring back shorthand; to impose aggressive protective tariffs; to keep all automation off the docks; and to prohibit any fastball above 89 miles an hour. The obvious trouble with all of this is that other nations will continue to automate their plants, their docks, and their offices, and will train to hit fastballs faster than 89 miles an hour – while our prices go up, and American factories do not magically reappear. The price for Mr. Trump’s salve is the loss of world leadership, and perhaps even deeper American disillusionment.
In what was an ode to immigrants in his last speech as president, President Ronald Reagan stated in part:
“While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams, we create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. … This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
This is a dilemma for which I would venture that no American president of any political stripe, no matter how wise or well-meaning, would have a ready answer. Ninety-two years ago, at a time when so many of our people were in much more dire straits than they are now, they put their faith in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom I rank as one of our three greatest presidents (along with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln). One of the greatest travesties of the upcoming Trump Administration may be that no meaningful initiatives are undertaken to see if there is any realistic solution to assist the voters motivated by economic fear who have placed their faith in Mr. Trump.
If you’ve made it through this post, I admire your tenacity. I’ve mentioned several times here since I started in the fall of 2017 – now a pretty long time ago, during the first year of Mr. Trump’s first term in office – that this site has provided me a means of catharsis during the most domestically turbulent period of my lifetime. (There was a point at which pundits compared the Trump Era to the Vietnam Era; having lived through both, I would submit that in terms of the breadth of overall national toxicity and threat to our national fabric, Vietnam now pales in comparison to the present day.) Even so, I admit that right now I am drained – as much by the fact that a majority of my fellow citizens choosing to cast ballots voted for Mr. Trump as that he won at all. (Even those fearful about their futures should have realized that no matter what challenges we face, Mr. Trump isn’t the answer.) That said, since by Constitutional definition, no efforts to degrade American democracy or dismantle of our traditional way of life will be undertaken before January 20, 2025, this seems the right time to give us both a respite to replenish (and also to provide these aging eyes with a literally sorely-needed break from what has been extended screen time). While it is certainly possible that Mr. Trump or his MAGA cohort will do something between now and Inauguration Day to sufficiently stir my ire – or that the Green Bay Packers, not as good as their record would indicate, will do something to stir my fervor 🙂 — so as to drive me to post, except for Holiday notes, I intend to be largely taking a break from these pages until the early part of the New Year.
Until then, stay well.
McCoy's Noise 