Donald Trump's Campaign Threatens to Steal Tea Party's Thunder

Ah, hardcore Ted Cruz supporters aren't going to love this argument.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Trump campaign threatens to steal tea party thunder":

Always a bit of a rebel, Debbie Dooley was so frustrated in 2009 over bank bailouts and stimulus packages that she threw herself into organizing Atlanta’s first tea party rally.

Today, the daughter of a Southern preacher has shifted her energy and passion into electing Donald Trump as the latest Washington outsider to shake up the status quo.

No matter that many of Trump’s policies stray from the tea party’s original small-government ideals. The tough-talking billionaire ignites that same anti-establishment fervor that fired up many tea party foot soldiers like Dooley.

In the process, Trump has recast their earlier champions — namely tea party darling Sen. Ted Cruz — as disappointing outsiders-turned-insiders who cater to corporate donors and fail to deliver on big promises.

“The support for Trump is not only a screw-you to the Republican establishment, it’s a screw-you to the conservative establishment,” said Dooley, 57, an energy consultant. “[People] are sick and tired of the same old, same old — just money corrupting the political process. They work hard, they vote for elected officials and they expect them to keep their promises.”

Trump’s candidacy has not only fractured the Republican Party, it’s threatening to break apart the tea party movement and erode a once-powerful voting block that has driven conservative politics and elections for the past seven years.

In addition to grass-root defections by activists like Dooley, tea party leadership has split over Trump’s presidential bid. Some conservative activists met this week to try to stop him, while others have joined his campaign.

Meanwhile, major financial backers, including groups funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, have been sidelined from publicly backing GOP primary candidates, partly out of fear they might alienate their divided base.

The soured relationship should come as no surprise. The tea party was always somewhat of a marriage of convenience between Washington’s free-market powerhouses and frustrated ordinary Americans who showed up at rallies with their tri-cornered hats and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags.

Fighting President Obama provided an easy alliance that Republicans at first leveraged to their advantage. But it also was a relationship built on what now looks like a rickety foundation — less about think-tank-driven policies and more about voter outrage against perceived elitism.

From an ideological standpoint, the tea party’s natural candidate should be Cruz, the Texas senator who was swept into office in the tea party revolt and wears his unpopularity in Washington as an “outsider” badge of honor.

But in Trump’s long shadow, Cruz and rival Sen. Marco Rubio, before he left the campaign, suddenly looked to many rank-and-file activists as part of the problem.

“I don’t see Ted Cruz being a job creator,” Dooley said...

Still more.

Deal of the Day: FoodSaver Vacuum Sealing System

At Amazon, FoodSaver V2244 Vacuum Sealing System with Starter Kit.

Plus, KIND Nuts & Spices, Dark Chocolate Nuts & Sea Salt, 1.4 Ounce, 12 Count.

Also, Save on Select Baseball & Softball Gear.

BONUS: From Sasha Issenberg, The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns.

Hillary Clinton’s Appalachian Problem

From the great Sasha Issenberg, at Bloomberg.

BONUS: At the New York Times, via Memeorandum, "As Hillary Clinton Sweeps States, One Group Resists: White Men."

Free Trade Doesn't Work

The author Ian Fletcher sent me a copy of this book a few years back, and then harangued me with constant emails about publishing a book review. Hey, I can't power through all these tomes on demand, lol.

Still, talk about timely. I wonder if this guy's lobbying for a trade policy position in the upcoming Donald Trump presidential administration, heh.

At Amazon, Free Trade Doesn't Work: What Should Replace It and Why.

Also, from Professor Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents.

More, from Jeff Madrick, Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present. And from Robert Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few.

BONUS: From Professor Benjamin J. Cohen, Currency Power: Understanding Monetary Rivalry.

Curly Haugland, RNC Rules Committee Member: 'Political parties choose their nominee, not the general public' (VIDEO)

Oh boy. Talk about bringing on those riots Donald Trump warned about.

At Blazing Cat Fur, "GOP Delegate: We Pick The Nominee, ‘Not The General Public’."

And watch, at CNBC, via Memeorandum, "We choose the nominee, not the voters: Senior GOP official."

Donald Trump and the Left's Accusations of Fascism

From Bruce Thornton, at FrontPage Magazine, "Trump and the Left’s Accusations of Fascism":

The stale ad Hitlerum fallacy used by progressives to demonize violators of the Party Line.

Donald Trump’s success in the primaries and his rhetoric have sparked troubled meditations about an awakening of fascist impulses among his supporters. Bret Stephens has drawn an analogy with the Thirties, “the last dark age of Western politics,” and compared Trump to Benito Mussolini. On the left, Dana Milbank, in a column titled “Trump Flirts with Fascism,” wrote about a campaign rally at which Trump was “leading supporters in what looked very much like a fascist salute,” a scene New York Times house-conservative David Brooks linked to the Nuremberg party rallies.

Much of the rhetoric that links Trump to fascism or Nazism is merely the stale ad Hitlerum fallacy used by progressives to demonize the candidate. They did the same thing when they called George W. Bush “Bushitler.” This slur reflects the hoary leftist dogma that conservatives at heart are repressed xenophobes and knuckle-dragging racists lusting for a messianic leader to restore their lost “white privilege” and punish their minority, immigrant, and feminist enemies. As such, the attack on Trump is nothing new or unexpected from a progressive ideology whose totalitarian inclinations have always had much more in common with fascism than conservatism does.

What Auden called the “low dishonest decade” of the Thirties, however, is indeed instructive for our predicament today, but not because of any danger of a fascist party taking root in modern America. Communism was (and in some ways still is) vastly more successful at infiltrating and shaping American political, cultural, and educational institutions than fascism ever was. But the same cultural pathologies that enabled both fascist and Nazi aggression still afflict us today. These pathologies and their malign effects are more important than the reasons for Trump’s popularity–– anger at elites, economic stagnation, and anti-immigrant passions–– that supposedly echo the “waves of fear and anger” of Auden’s Thirties.

The most important delusion of the Thirties still active today is the idealistic internationalism that had developed over the previous century. A world shrunk by new communication and transportation technologies and linked by global trade, internationalists argued, meant nations and peoples were becoming more alike. Thus they desired the same prosperity, political freedom, human rights, and peace that the West enjoyed. Interstate relations now should be based on this “harmony of interests,” and managed by non-lethal transnational organizations rather than by force. Covenants and treaties like the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and institutions like the League of Nations and the International Court of Arbitration, could peacefully resolve conflicts among nations through diplomatic engagement, negotiation, and appeasement.

The Preamble to the First Hague Convention (1899) captures the idealism that would compromise foreign policy in the Thirties. The Convention’s aims were “the maintenance of the general peace” and “the friendly settlement of international disputes.” This goal was based on the “solidarity which unites the member of the society of civilized nations” and their shared desire for “extending the empire of law and of strengthening the appreciation of international justice.” Two decades later, the monstrous death and destruction of World War I should have shattered the delusion of such “solidarity” existing even among the “civilized nations.” Despite that gruesome lesson, Europe doubled down and created the League of Nations, which failed to stop the serial aggression that culminated in World War II.

But the League wasn’t the only manifestation of naïve internationalism. The Locarno Treaty of 1925 welcomed Germany back into the community of nations with a seat on the League of Nations council. Nobel Peace prizes, and wish-fulfilling headlines like the New York Times’ “France and Germany Bar War Forever,” were all that resulted. The Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928 “condemn[ed] recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce[d] it as an instrument of national policy” in interstate relations. The signing powers asserted that “the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts . . . shall never be sought except by pacific means.”

All the future Axis Powers signed the treaty, and they all soon shredded these “parchment barriers.” In the next few years, Japan invaded Manchuria, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in gross violation of the Versailles Treaty, and Italy invaded Ethiopia. By the time Germany annexed Austria, and Neville Chamberlain’s faith in negotiation and appeasement handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler, all these treaties and conventions and conferences were dead letters, and the League of Nations was exposed as a “cockpit in the tower of Babel,” as Churchill suggested after the First World War.

However, such graphic and costly evidence showing the folly of “covenants without the sword,” as Hobbes put it, did not discredit this dangerous idealism over the following decades. Indeed, it lies behind the disasters of Obama’s foreign policy. Just consider his “outreach” to our enemies, his acknowledgement of our own “imperfections,” his reliance on toothless U.N. Security Council Resolutions, his preference for non-lethal economic sanctions to pressure adversaries, and his belief that negotiated settlements and agreements can achieve peace and good relations even with our fiercest enemies. All reflect the same failure to recognize that our adversaries in fact do not sincerely want to reach an agreement, for the simple reason they are not in fact “just like us,” and so they do not want peace and prosperity and good relations with their neighbors and the “world community.”

The catalogue of Obama’s failures is long and depressing...

A great essay.

Keep reading.

Tuesday's Primary Voters Expressed Major Worries About the Economy (VIDEO)

This is a great segment from CNN below.

Combined, close to 95 percent of GOP primary voters are "very worried" or "somewhat worried" about the economy, and those voters went for Donald Trump by around 45 percent. (Democrats say they're not as worried about the economy, but that's under-reporting in order to protect Obama. They're worried, just not as openly as Republicans are, and even if they say their own economic situation is under control, it's all "There but for the grace of God go I" when these same voters see their very neighbors and family members struggling in the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression.)

Donald Trump 'Won’t Be a Pushover' in the General Election

I don't know why people think he would be. And I don't know why people think that nominating Trump is "giving away" the election to the Democrats.

It's going to be the most polarizing election we've had in decades, and perhaps as close as the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. All the talk about Republican voters sitting out the election is pure speculation at this point. Polls showing large numbers of GOP primary voters saying they'd "never" vote for Trump are likely to change, especially once the general election campaign gets rolling in September. Stay tuned.

In any case, see Instapundit, "DONALD TRUMP’S NEW HILLARY ATTACK AD suggests that he won’t be a pushover in a general election contest (VIDEO)."

Laura Ingraham: Time for Republicans to Unite Behind Donald Trump (VIDEO)

Well, you'd think.

But I expect the GOPe will pull a circular firing squad before uniting behind the electorate's Republican primary front-runner --- and that's sad.

Here's Ms. Ingraham, with Greta Van Susteren yesterday:

Stop Comparing Donald Trump to Adolph Hitler

From Michael Lind, at Politico, "Quit Comparing Trump to Hitler!":

This indirect version of the Hitler smear goes back to the 1950s, when émigré Marxist intellectuals of the so-called Frankfurt School, many of them refugees from Hitler, wondered why the masses of their adopted country had not yet risen up to overthrow capitalism. Their answer was that many if not most of the blue collar workers in the country that had saved them were sinister brownshirts in the making, afflicted with “authoritarian personalities.”

Around the same time, centrists like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Peter Viereck were appalled and puzzled by the demagogic appeal of the red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy. They couldn’t understand why everybody in America didn’t join them in rallying behind Adlai Stevenson. For these centrists and liberals, the historian Richard Hofstadter supplied an explanation in his essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” More careful historians, in Hofstadter’s time and ours, have demolished his explanation of the populist movement in terms of irrational, quasi-fascist paranoia. But the phrase “the paranoid style” is endlessly recycled by lazy journalists and editorial page columnists. And the equally dubious Frankfurt School concept of the “authoritarian personality” is likewise recycled by social scientists in every election cycle. Typically the liberal academics begin by equating regular conservatism or run-of-the-mill populism with “authoritarianism” and then predictably discover—surprise!—that “authoritarianism” thus defined is found among conservatives and populists.

Of course both sides can play the Hitler smear game. In October 1964, Republican Representative William Miller compared President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society reform to the Hitler regime. More recently, the conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism, which equated the entire Progressive-Liberal tradition from Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt to the present with Italian Fascism and German Nationalism, was a best-seller on the right.

That Obama is the new Hitler has been a frequent theme of conservative commentators and politicians during his two terms in office. A low point came when Mike Huckabee said that as a result of the multinational Iranian nuclear deal, President Obama “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.”

All of this bears out the “law” of the Internet age put forward by Mike Godwin, an American attorney and author, that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” But long before Godwin, the German philosopher Leo Strauss—himself a Jewish refugee from Hitler—dismissed what he called the argumentum ad Hitlerum as a cheap debating trick: “A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler.”

Actually, Mike Godwin recently argued that Godwin's "law" might not actually apply to Trump --- you know, if the shoe fits, or something, idiot.

In any case, more at the link.

Donald Trump Talks About Bringing Jobs Back Home, With Sean Hannity in North Carolina (VIDEO)

It's a tall order, Trump's claim that he's going to turn things around in the U.S. economy by adopting aggressive trade protectionism. Still, he's resonating with the people like mad.

Here's the New York Times' report on Trump's trade agenda from last week, "On Trade, Donald Trump Breaks With 200 Years of Economic Orthodoxy."

And watch Trump below with Hannity last week in North Carolina. The crowd was overfill, and thousands were still lined-up outside the venue, unable to get in. This is becoming a phenomenon. His campaign's becoming a social movement, and I expect it's even bigger and more spectacular than what bits here and there indicate during mainstream television coverage. Something's happening with the great unwashed silent majority. It's really amazing.

George Kennan Died 11 Years Ago Today, March 17, 2005

Kennan's most famous essay, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," published under the pseudonym "X", laid out the basis for the U.S. "containment" doctrine.

The essay was published at Foreign Affairs, in July 1947:

The political personality of Soviet power as we know it today is the product of ideology and circumstances: ideology inherited by the present Soviet leaders from the movement in which they had their political origin, and circumstances of the power which they now have exercised for nearly three decades in Russia. There can be few tasks of psychological analysis more difficult than to try to trace the interaction of these two forces and the relative role of each in the determination of official Soviet conduct. Yet the attempt must be made if that conduct is to be understood and effectively countered.

It is difficult to summarize the set of ideological concepts with which the Soviet leaders came into power. Marxian ideology, in its Russian-Communist projection, has always been in process of subtle evolution. The materials on which it bases itself are extensive and complex. But the outstanding features of Communist thought as it existed in 1916 may perhaps be summarized as follows: (a) that the central factor in the life of man, the factor which determines the character of public life and the "physiognomy of society," is the system by which material goods are produced and exchanged; (b) that the capitalist system of production is a nefarious one which inevitably leads to the exploitation of the working class by the capital-owning class and is incapable of developing adequately the economic resources of society or of distributing fairly the material goods produced by human labor; (c) that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction and must, in view of the inability of the capital-owning class to adjust itself to economic change, result eventually and inescapably in a revolutionary transfer of power to the working class; and (d) that imperialism, the final phase of capitalism, leads directly to war and revolution.

The rest may be outlined in Lenin's own words: "Unevenness of economic and political development is the inflexible law of capitalism. It follows from this that the victory of Socialism may come originally in a few capitalist countries or even in a single capitalist country. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and having organized Socialist production at home, would rise against the remaining capitalist world, drawing to itself in the process the oppressed classes of other countries." It must be noted that there was no assumption that capitalism would perish without proletarian revolution. A final push was needed from a revolutionary proletariat movement in order to tip over the tottering structure. But it was regarded as inevitable that sooner or later that push be given.

For 50 years prior to the outbreak of the Revolution, this pattern of thought had exercised great fascination for the members of the Russian revolutionary movement...

There's a PDF version here.

PHOTO CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons.

Hailey Clauson Outtakes Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2016 (VIDEO)

She's really fabulous.

Of the three cover editions of the new issues, Clauson's are flying off the shelves. The others, not so much.

Jackie Johnson's Above-Average Temperature Forecast

Very summery weather today, heh.

Plus, at the beginning of the video is Island Grissom, one of the THUMS Islands, in Long Beach, which is a man-made oil-production facility. One of my best friends had connections and landed a roughneck job there in the early-1980s, and it was union-pay with astronomical hourly wages. People couldn't believe it when my buddy quit the job after a year or so, because he would have been set for life. Interesting.

Hoover FloorMate Deluxe Hard Floor Cleaner

So, Amazon's really pushing the spring cleaning items, lol.

Here, today only, Hoover FloorMate Deluxe Hard Floor Cleaner, FH40160PC.

Also, Kindle Countdown Deals: Limited-Time Discounts on Amazon Kindle-Exclusive Books.

Plus, Save on Toys and Baby Gear.

BONUS: From Matt Lewis, Too Dumb to Fail: How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections (and How It Can Reclaim Its Conservative Roots).

Also, from E.J. Dionne, Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism--From Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond.

Donald Trump Wins Florida GOP Primary, Knocks Out Rubio; Kasich Wins Ohio to Stay Alive (VIDEO)

Trump won Florida, Illinois, and North Carolina. Kasich took his home state, where he's the sitting governor. Missouri is still too close to call and folks were talking about statewide recounts last night.

In any case, the nomination's Donald Trump's for all intents and purposes. He'd have to have some kind of spectacular collapse to prevent him from heading into the Cleveland convention without the necessary delegates to win on the first ballot. Indeed, with Kasich staying in the race, he'll siphon votes from Ted Cruz, however small, which will allow Trump to continue to win the plurality of GOP primary voters in the remaining contests.

Now all the GOPe can do is hope for contested convention, or frankly, get behind a dark-horse third party candidate, which would mean the end of the party as a legitimate organization.

More, at LAT, "Trump builds momentum with at least 3 more wins; Rubio drops out, Kasich takes Ohio":

Donald Trump romped to victory Tuesday in Florida, chasing Marco Rubio from the race, but Ohio Gov. John Kasich won his home state, raising hopes for those seeking to stop Trump and settle the presidential contest on the floor of the Republican National Convention.

Trump also won North Carolina and Illinois and was locked in a close fight with Sen. Ted Cruz in Missouri.

“I'm getting ready to rent a covered wagon, we're going to have a big sail and have the wind blow us to the Rocky Mountains and over the mountains to California,” Kasich said at a jubilant rally outside Cleveland.

That is just the sort of extended nominating fight the GOP establishment sought to avoid by stacking the political calendar with big early contests, capped by Tuesday night's winner-take-all primaries in Florida and Ohio. California votes on June 7, near the close of the primary season.

Now, many of those same party types see an inconclusive nominating contest as the best and perhaps only chance of thwarting Trump, even if it threatens to shred the GOP in the process.

The setback in Ohio, where Trump campaigned hard, was his most disappointing performance since he finished second to Cruz in February's Iowa caucuses.

His unhappiness was evident as he addressed reporters at his posh Mar-a-Lago private club in Palm Beach, Fla., and complained about the miseries of running for president.

“Lies, deceit, viciousness. Disgusting reporters. Horrible people,” the Manhattan businessman and reality TV star said. “Some are nice.”

Cruz, speaking with 99% of the Missouri votes counted, once more insisted he was the only candidate who could defeat Trump.

“Starting tomorrow morning, every Republican has a clear choice. Only two campaigns have a plausible path to the nomination — ours and Donald Trump's,” the Texas senator told supporters in Houston. “Nobody else has any mathematical possibility whatsoever. Only one campaign has beaten Donald Trump over and over again.”

With Trump's unmatched string of victories, no other candidate is nearly as well positioned to win the nomination ahead of the July convention in Cleveland. He padded his overall delegate lead with Tuesday's victories, putting him ahead of Cruz and Kasich, who had not won a state before Ohio.

But there were signs Tuesday that not just the establishment but rank-and-file Republicans have yet to rally around the party's polarizing front-runner.

Nearly 3 in 10 Republican voters across the five states said they would not vote for Trump if he wins the party's nomination, according to exit poll interviews. Four in 10 said they would consider voting for a third-party candidate if the choice came down to Trump or the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton.

Defections of that magnitude could badly undermine Trump in the general election, and that prospect will probably be stressed by his opponents going forward into next week's contests in Arizona and Utah.

More.

'Top Conservatives' Plot Third Party Run to Stop Donald Trump

Nothing will guarantee a Hillary Clinton presidency more than a plot to run an independent bid against Donald Trump as the GOP nominee.

At Politico, "Top conservatives gather to plot third-party run against Trump":

Three influential leaders of the conservative movement have summoned other top conservatives for a closed-door meeting Thursday in Washington, D.C., to talk about how to stop Donald Trump and, should he become the Republican nominee, how to run a third-party “true conservative” challenger in the fall.

The organizers of the meeting include Bill Wichterman, who was President George W. Bush’s liaison to the conservative movement; Bob Fischer, a South Dakota businessman and longtime conservative convener; and Erick Erickson, the outspoken Trump opponent and conservative activist who founded RedState.com.

Erick Erickson's an asshole.

But keep reading, FWIW.

Donald Trump Has Earned Close to $2 Billion in Earned Media

Well, he's a political genius, that's for sure.

At the New York Times, "Measuring Donald Trump's Mammoth Advantage in Free Media":

Of all the ways Donald Trump has shocked the political system, one of the most significant is how he wins primary after primary with one of the smallest campaign budgets.

He still doesn’t have a super PAC. He skimped on ground organization and field offices. Most important, he spent less on television advertising — typically the single biggest expenditure for a campaign — than any other major candidate, according to an analysis by SMG Delta, a firm that tracks television advertising.

But Mr. Trump is hardly absent from the airwaves. Like all candidates, he benefits from what is known as earned media: news and commentary about his campaign on television, in newspapers and magazines, and on social media. Earned media typically dwarfs paid media in a campaign. The big difference between Mr. Trump and other candidates is that he is far better than any other candidate — maybe than any candidate ever — at earning media.

No one knows this better than mediaQuant, a firm that tracks media coverage of each candidate and computes a dollar value based on advertising rates. The mentions are weighted by the reach of the media source, meaning how many people were likely to see it. The calculation also includes traditional media of all types, print, broadcast or otherwise, as well as online-only sources like Facebook, Twitter or Reddit.

Its numbers are not quite an apples-to-apples comparison to paid advertising. But they do make one thing clear: Mr. Trump is not just a little better at earning media. He is way better than any of the other candidates.

Mr. Trump earned $400 million worth of free media last month, about what John McCain spent on his entire 2008 presidential campaign. Paul Senatori, mediaQuant’s chief analytics officer, says that Mr. Trump “has no weakness in any of the media segments” — in other words, he is strong in every type of earned media, from television to Twitter.

Over the course of the campaign, he has earned close to $2 billion worth of media attention, about twice the all-in price of the most expensive presidential campaigns in history...

More.

Thomas Frank's New Book, Listen, Liberal

Say what you will about him (he's certainly a hardline leftist), Frank's definitely got the Trump phenomenon nailed down.

At Amazon, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

Millions of Ordinary Americans Back Donald Trump, and Not Because of 'Racism' Either

The Weekly Standard's piece from last year remains the best analysis on the demographics behind the Trump phenomenon. See, "The Political Establishment's Terrified by Donald Trump's 'Tangible American Nationalism'."

But this Thomas Frank piece, at the Guardian, is pretty darn good --- all the more so since Frank's a hardline leftist. See, "Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why":

Trade is an issue that polarizes Americans by socio-economic status. To the professional class, which encompasses the vast majority of our media figures, economists, Washington officials and Democratic powerbrokers, what they call “free trade” is something so obviously good and noble it doesn’t require explanation or inquiry or even thought. Republican and Democratic leaders alike agree on this, and no amount of facts can move them from their Econ 101 dream.

To the remaining 80 or 90% of America [not populated by Trump supporters], trade means something very different [than economic decimation]. There’s a video going around on the internet these days that shows a room full of workers at a Carrier air conditioning plant in Indiana being told by an officer of the company that the factory is being moved to Monterrey, Mexico, and that they’re all going to lose their jobs.

As I watched it, I thought of all the arguments over trade that we’ve had in this country since the early 1990s, all the sweet words from our economists about the scientifically proven benevolence of free trade, all the ways in which our newspapers mock people who say that treaties like the North American Free Trade Agreement allow companies to move jobs to Mexico.

Well, here is a video of a company moving its jobs to Mexico, courtesy of Nafta. This is what it looks like. The Carrier executive talks in that familiar and highly professional HR language about the need to “stay competitive” and “the extremely price-sensitive marketplace”. A worker shouts “Fuck you!” at the executive. The executive asks people to please be quiet so he can “share” his “information”. His information about all of them losing their jobs.

* * *

Now, I have no special reason to doubt the suspicion that Donald Trump is a racist. Either he is one, or (as the comedian John Oliver puts it) he is pretending to be one, which amounts to the same thing.

But there is another way to interpret the Trump phenomenon. A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington’s free-market consensus have brought the rest of America.

It is worth noting that Trump is making a point of assailing that Indiana air conditioning company from the video in his speeches. What this suggests is that he’s telling a tale as much about economic outrage as it is tale of racism on the march. Many of Trump’s followers are bigots, no doubt, but many more are probably excited by the prospect of a president who seems to mean it when he denounces our trade agreements and promises to bring the hammer down on the CEO that fired you and wrecked your town, unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Here is the most salient supporting fact: when people talk to white, working-class Trump supporters, instead of simply imagining what they might say, they find that what most concerns these people is the economy and their place in it. I am referring to a study just published by Working America, a political-action auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, which interviewed some 1,600 white working-class voters in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh in December and January.

Support for Donald Trump, the group found, ran strong among these people, even among self-identified Democrats, but not because they are all pining for a racist in the White House. Their favorite aspect of Trump was his “attitude”, the blunt and forthright way he talks. As far as issues are concerned, “immigration” placed third among the matters such voters care about, far behind their number one concern: “good jobs / the economy”.

“People are much more frightened than they are bigoted,” is how the findings were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America. The survey “confirmed what we heard all the time: people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids don’t have a future” and that “there still hasn’t been a recovery from the recession, that every family still suffers from it in one way or another.”

Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council in Fort Wayne, puts it even more bluntly when I asked him about working-class Trump fans. “These people aren’t racist, not any more than anybody else is,” he says of Trump supporters he knows. “When Trump talks about trade, we think about the Clinton administration, first with Nafta and then with [Permanent Normal Trade Relations] China, and here in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged jobs.”

“They look at that, and here’s Trump talking about trade, in a ham-handed way, but at least he’s representing emotionally. We’ve had all the political establishment standing behind every trade deal, and we endorsed some of these people, and then we’ve had to fight them to get them to represent us.”

Now, let us stop and smell the perversity. Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people’s concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a “creative class” that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn’t need to listen to them any longer.

What Lewandowski and Nussbaum are saying, then, should be obvious to anyone who’s dipped a toe outside the prosperous enclaves on the two coasts. Ill-considered trade deals and generous bank bailouts and guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average people, ever – these policies have taken their toll. As Trump says, “we have rebuilt China and yet our country is falling apart. Our infrastructure is falling apart … Our airports are, like, Third World.”

Trump’s words articulate the populist backlash against liberalism that has been building slowly for decades and may very well occupy the White House itself, whereupon the entire world will be required to take seriously its demented ideas.

Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.

Plus, here's Frank's book, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?