I clipped the attachment off social media about a week ago, as you can see it is dated 16 Dec 18; I don't follow the originator so one of the people I follow repeated it ...
I think it matters because as I, and some smart people, too, like Niall Ferguson and Stephen Harper, have been saying, Donald Trump is just the symptom of a deep malaise in American, and Western society. He could resign tomorrow and the angry, anti-globalization, anti-immigrant, protectionist, even isolationist
movement would continue and even strengthen.
Put very simply, globalization left too many Americans and Brits and Canadians and, and, and underemployed and stripped of the dignity that a job provides. They lost too much from the globalization that ran, mainly unchecked, from about the mid 1960s until now ... I have used
this (982) song as shorthand to explain what happened. It wasn't just China, it was also Japan and South Korea and others ... and it wasn't just cheap labour. The Asians didn't just work for less, they worked smarter for less. The fault wasn't just trade unions, as I have been saying for years, I'm a big fan of trade unions: they have done wonders for workers' rights, above all in health and safety issues, but trade unions are just as likely to have faulty leadership as are remote
First Nations, the
Canadian Forces and governments like those in Canada and the USA. In North America and Europe Trade Union leaders were, fairly consistently, after the 1950s, narrow minded and parochial and, with a few notable exceptions (including the Canadian Auto Workers), focused on the short term, the next quarter, rather than thinking strategically.
(Anecdotally, I was posted (early 1980s) to HQ AFCENT in Brunssum in the Netherlands. Our landscape was dotted with slag heaps, the remnants of the coal mines that had closed 20 years earlier (those mine closures had been one part of the impetus for moving AFCENT from France to the Netherlands, Charles de Gaulle was the other). Being the Netherlands, the slag heaps were covered with grass and trees and many were recreation facilities, but nothing could disguise the fact that South Limburg province had gone from being a rich province full of hard working miners to an economic backwater because the USA, Australia and neighbouring Germany were producing better (cleaner) coal for less per ton, after it was transported to the Ruhr or South Korea.)
I have written about what Professor Guy Standing of the
University of London calls the
precariat, which he describes as "
the growing mass of Canadians who are in precarious work, precarious housing and hold precarious citizenship: the perpetual part-timers, the minimum-wagers, the temporary foreign workers, the grey-market domestics paid in cash, the young Canadians who will never have secure employment, the techno-impoverished whose piecemeal work has no office and no end, the seniors who struggle with dwindling benefits, the indigenous people who are kept outside, the single mothers without support, the cash labourers who have no savings, the generation for whom a pension and a retirement is neither available nor desired … [and] … The precariat consists of millions of people struggling to come to terms with lives of unstable labour and unstable living, lacking an occupational identity or career. They rely on money wages, which are stagnant and volatile, putting them in constant fear of unsustainable debt. The politicians have ignored the precariat, which may account for 40 per cent of the adult population in Canada. In some countries, it is more; it is growing everywhere … [and, worse] … the precariat has been losing citizenship rights – civil, cultural, political, social and economic. As such, they are becoming supplicants: They must ask for favours and benefits, satisfy bureaucrats and depend on discretionary decisions that subject them to discomfort, indignity and even homelessness." That's the
source of President Trump; they're his base; he is their creature, not they his. Donald Trump might drop dead today and they would still be here and their problems would still be festering sores on the body politic in America, Australia, Britain, Canada, Denmark and Estonia.
Donald Trump is not the problem, he is simply a symptom ~ a rather nasty, even dirty symptom, in my opinion, but that's all he is. If we want fewer Trumps and more traditional, classical
liberalism then we need to address the concerns of the
precariat.
Edited to correct an embarrassing grammar error.
