In November, residential construction had looked like it had rebounded from its losses earlier this year, more confirmation of the rebound in the long leading housing sector – but that was revised away this month!Much has been written about voters, sometimes labeled the “white working class”, who live in small towns, have low incomes and supported Trump in 2016. There are various hypotheses—not, despite the rhetoric, mutually exclusive—that have been proposed to explain this: never-ending latent racism galvanized by the experience of having a black president, a vote of despair in the face of economic decline, paranoia fueled by fictitious narratives of immigrant crowding and crime. I just finished reading a post-mortem on the recent British election that, by analogy, suggests two more hypotheses about Trumpism:
1) With decades-long declines in deindustrializing areas, there has been a steady outflow of mostly younger residents. This has a tendency to shift the politics of those who remain to the right based on age considerations alone, but the outflow is likely selective in other respects as well. Those who light out to the cities are probably better educated and more tuned in to trends in metropolitan culture, taking their blue votes to jurisdictions that already pile up big majorities for Democrats.
2) What do people do when they lose their long-term jobs in manufacturing and the relatively well-paid services that cluster around manufacturing nodes? If they don’t emigrate, what’s left? Many look for bits of opportunity where they can find them, combinations of self-employment, gig work, off-the-books service work, etc. Those who scrounge for income in these ways are the same people as the workers who were laid off during deindustrialization, but their class position has changed. They no longer look to unions or government regulation to protect their interest against employers, quite the opposite. Union work now competes with them, and regulation just makes it harder to cut the corners their livelihood depends on cutting. In other words, their income has gone down but they are less “working class” than before.
Just to be clear, I’m not pushing these explanations. They are just hypotheses, and it isn’t obvious to me what kind of evidence would adjudicate them.
