I'm a Liberal Who Voted For Trump. Here's why.

Last week, I got into my Prius, pulled it silently out of my driveway (after tooting the horn twice, to warn any cats in the vicinity to watch out), and glided off to my local poll.  There, I grabbed the ballot, voted to legalize marijuana, keep bans on corporate finance of campaigns in place, and ban the distribution of disposable plastic grocery bags.  Also, for Donald J Trump as president.  How can this paradox be explained?!

Some who know me probably suspect it's because I believe in cultural libertarianism rather than cultural leftism; that is to say, I reject the politically-correct, "don't punch down" principle that has taken hold in too much of the Left and overridden its commitment to liberal ideals like free speech and secularism whenever there's the slightest chance that someone of some marginalized group might be offended by it.  Pushing everybody into a national drum circle where they all hold their tongues for fear of disrupting harmony is not the right way to call upon American values to build a society that is "Stronger Together"; America is the land of "Freedom to" and not "Freedom from", and every politician and pundit who wants to be taken seriously must understand this.  However, no; unlike some people, I didn't vote Trump to smack down political correctness, because in practice, Trump's opposition to it so far has consisted of little more than trolling its mendacity with his own, to the effect that each feels more and more vindicated and their angsty spews have both gotten more and more inescapable.  It's an insult arms race, with no Insult Arms Limitation Treaty in sight.

Some may suspect it's because I feel a great need to combat Islamic radicalism.  Trump has pledged to do this, but his only real idea for how is to restrict immigration from states it infests; what the world really needs is an idea of how to save the victims in those states from the radicalism that has scared them into immigrating to the west and might sneak in with them, and I'm not convinced Trump has any, so no; that's not it, either.

Yet buried amidst the insults and inexperience that proliferate in Trump's plans for America, there is one point that resonates loud and clear with me, and that is the desire to combat the global free trade lobby that has wrecked America and the world for decades.

Trump's marketing to "Joe Sixpack" has focused to a great extent on keeping jobs here, and I support this, too, but American blue-collar workers losing jobs as their employers flee abroad to foreign states represent only one part of this massive disaster, and plenty others, people on the Left have been calling out faster than the Right did.  Think of the tragedies of freely-traded beef: American farmers work in the American countryside, which is an opportune place to farm sustainably, but they also take American wages, which means that food bought from them needs to cost more to pay those wages.  So the food businesses stop relying on them and instead go to countries where they can pay lower wages to farmers, in a region where they can't do it sustainably, so they have to keep cutting down the rainforest to do it.  Think of the tragedies of landfill upon landfill of discarded American goods.  Why do we, as a nation not overwhelmingly represented in the global population census, produce the overwhelming majority of the world's garbage?  As the cliche goes, "because we can"...economically speaking.

Stay environmentalist, California!

Once again, the wage disparity between America and the other nations its manufacturing companies flee to has created a destructive scenario wherein it is economically advantageous for Americans to discard and replace their broken, glitchy or simply outdated goods rather than repairing them.  Physical capital such as plastic, silicon and copper cost money, buying more than you already have will set you back, but as overseas costs to manufacture new goods are so much lower than American technicians would charge to repair these things, that cost isn't relevant enough.  So it's in with the new, out to the dump with the old, and that's even before we get into the damage caused to the natural environment from mining the materials and running the machines to keep building the new.  People here take replacing goods for granted, and the snowball effect it has had on our consumer culture has gotten ever more nauseating.  California is getting more and more Left, you say?  Then why are we so constantly downwind of propaganda from technology companies that tell us how cool we'll be if we buy yet another smartphone made in China, as if we didn't already own three?! 

The unfortunate answer is that the Left, as they exist in politics, have lost their way for decades.  Even as leftists on the ground pleaded to "Save the Rainforest" and "Stop the Dump", the Clintons' brand of Neoliberalism has continued to be the guiding principle among both elected Democrats and left-coast plutocrats.  Decades ago, as communism fell, trade picked up, the media got louder and more globalized and "New Labour" (allegedly) supplanted Thatcherism in Britain, a big focus of "liberals" has been painting a happy, utopian face on the profit-motivated, trade-bound world order that Nixon, Thatcher and Reagan engineered.  The world was coming together, gushed the bold neoliberals, people were communicating with one another, economies were improving on paper, people of all races and creeds were jetting around and shaking hands.  If we could learn to get along with and respect all the people within our borders, the neoliberals argued, surely the same could be true of those outside them, right?  Well let's put it this way, passing the Emancipation Proclamation and banning Jim Crow laws didn't cause businesses to flee, jungles to be destroyed, ice to be melted, or landfills to be clogged.

Things were going to break eventually.  It didn't take long for the notion of a more peaceful, friendly world than we had in the Cold War to be dealt many humiliating blows by a resurgence of terrorists (Many of them from nations that had gotten rich from global free trade), but for a while, the elites on both the Left and the Right were able to maintain the trust of their constituents by pointing the finger at each other and demonizing. (Then they hopped on a plane to go chum with foreign dictators, negotiating more dollar diplomacy.)  People could be made to think one party or the other was on their side for a while, but after over two decades of changing the guard, without a key answer about reigning in the problematic system of political and business elites making deals with themselves in mind; not their people or the planet, at some point there would have to come candidates who said "Stop it".

Unfortunately, this turned out to be Trump--because the Democrats in charge didn't want Sanders.  They had figured that, in the face of Trump's obnoxious trolling of political correctness, they could fall back on identity politics, their trusty weapon for romanticizing globalization, to bring enough anti-Trump forces out of the woodwork.  After all, we had twice proven that we were willing to elect our first black president, because, as his posters proclaimed, "Yes We Can".  We had shown we were willing to symbolize we respected black people; surely we would do the same for women, right? 

Sure...but what type of women?  If the disenfranchised, change-happy segments of society placed a lot of value on political insiders with experience navigating the system, then logically in 2008 our first black President would have been Colin Powell--but they didn't, so he wasn't.  They wanted a new, relatively untested man with new, relatively untested ideas, ideas that felt like they came from the people voting him in, and weren't scarred by the legacy of his associates' failings, and they got him.  There was a certain irony to President Obama's choice of words during Hillary's election night rally, reminding the people that Hillary had gained the admiration of others within the system, including Republicans, at a time when many in the Left (and the Right, now) have never felt more assured and angry that the system is broken.  Globalist plutocracy broke it, is what we both cried.  To be sure, Trump was a part of the plutocratic system, too, but in his campaign he was condemning NAFTA, and running against a woman whose family's greatest legacy was NAFTA.  The choice seemed easy to me: Free-trade and outsourcing have to go; I have been saying this for years, and so I drove my Prius to the poll and helped elect the most anti-free-trade choice (at least who actually won primaries) in decades.

Which believe me, is not to be taken as soapboxing.  I don't blame anybody for voting for Trump, but I don't blame anybody for not voting for him, either.  There are plenty of Republicans I would far less like to elect than Trump, but that doesn't mean I think he's ideal.  He's run his campaign like a jackass, he's unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of politics, he's thus-far done nothing to political correctness other than reassure itself of its veracity, and perhaps most importantly, it could be naive to expect a billionaire to fulfill his promises to save America from so many other billionaires.  Even if sincere in this matter, Trump will likely face opposition from the more standard big-business Republicans who now control the Legislature.  Much of what I say about the environmental need to stop free-trade could be undermined if Trump's proposals for laxer environmental laws pass, but his proposals for defeating outsourcing do not.  Other negative effects of Trump's presidency could be so bad that none of it will be worth it.  Trump could be a failure.

However, I am here to advise fellow liberals that things aren't all gloom and doom these days.  Maybe, Trump will surprise you, and end up doing a lot of what you wish your own party could have done, but even if he doesn't, the way things have gone still allows for rebound.  Even if Trump doesn't end up saving America from outsourcing, the fact is that he campaigned on the promise of doing so, and he succeeded with the core of a party that we'd long-since written off as gung-ho supporters of the free market in all its forms; opposed to the ideas of helping the underdogs.  This isn't trivial.  However much the ideologues want to write off these people as a "Basket of Deplorables" describable by various insults ending in "ist", they won an election, and if those who underestimated them want to roll with this punch, they will need to be reckoned with.  The good news for the Democrats is that I think they can.  The blue-collar theme of Trump's populist conservatism can actually resonate very well with the sort of protectionist economics the Left used to stand for, and many of its on-the-street proponents still do. 

Much of the media is now coming around to the idea that Trump is a protest candidate for the sorts of Americans who felt powerless voting for anyone else, but contrary to what the media said, it's not just because the social views of the left couldn't be reconciled with more "redneck" attitudes; it's because the economic existence of the American lower class has become one of scraping by on not-enough money, some of it just from welfare, and managing to do it only by caving in to buy cheap Chinese goods at Walmart and cheap South American beef at McDonald's; no time to care about what deals with devils created them.  That's no way for people to live and feel good about themselves; what these people need is the sense of empowerment that Rosie the Riveter gave women once, and likewise, it must come from the availability of industrial jobs that make them upwardly mobile.  Meanwhile, the middle class has gotten numb to the hidden costs of free trade because they're its beneficiaries; doing skilled labor to buy many more goods, and because in the coastal cities they inhabit, they can now take a deep breath and not smell smoke, it's easier for them to patch the delusion of a more environmentally friendly world order into their "Not in My Backyard" sensibilities, when in fact, things are more at risk than ever.  It couldn't last, and it hasn't.

So next time there's an election, try this: Repackage protectionism in less obnoxious terms than Trump did.  Instead of ethno-nationalism, talk about the economic empowerment of the poor.  Talk about curtailing our waste.  Talk about the uplifting feeling of being a creator of things, instead of just a consumer of things.  Talk about the restoration of ideals; not profit, to the core of our foreign policy.  Jettison moral preaching about racism entirely, because the first step to stopping citizens from hating each other is to create a country where they don't feel threatened for jobs by each other.  I bet you a surprising amount of the basket of deplorables will get on board. 

Because we all need this, and it's been an issue for years.  We cannot keep selling out those citizens most economically at risk.  We cannot keep losing the productive potential that really did make America great in ways it hasn't been for a while.  We cannot keep littering at the rate that outsourcing has enabled.  We cannot keep sending money to empower countries with terrible standards in environmental protection and human rights.  Curtailing all of this will give Americans, at least the sort who were used to the lazy lifestyle it enabled, a sizable kick in the balls, but it was needed, and I challenge many liberals of the bent I have to deny these points.  Time will tell if I elected the wrong President, but I feel confident in saying now that I did it for all of the right reasons.