The questions that elected Trump and can create an enduring Progressive legacy
Much cyber and physical ink will be spent for a very long time discussing exactly how Donald Trump won this election (if indeed, he did win it). The answer, together with the discussion that needs to be had, can be found in three questions and their answers - all featured in 1990s tv series - although I never would have imagined it at the time.
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Back in the 1990s, we lived in Brooklyn. I was a clerk at that time and my partner was a CUNY student. Our budget was quite tight, but we managed to afford the level of cable required for us to see, every week, a show titled “Babylon Five.”
Babylon Five was a science fiction show, widely viewed as “grade b” by all the very important people among critics, but one of the best series of any type that I have ever seen. In it there were a number of different races and power groups, as is standard for science fiction. Two ancient races were among them and various factions of humans and aliens. Many of the groups had signature questions, that they routinely asked. The Vorlon Question was “Who are you?” The Shadow (opposite number to the Vorlons) question was “What do you want?” and the most pertinent of the human questions, from a power group called The Technomages was “Where are you going?”
Those three questions, in real life, determined the election this year, and we as a culture, regardless of ideology, need to resolve all three to determine the future for our children and grandchildren.
— How did they determine the election?
The Vorlon Question affected the election in many ways. Who are we as a people? That was one of the questions being pushed, in different ways, by both sides, by all the candidates. Ultimately we decided as a corporate body that we were accepting open people who welcomed a diverse society. Narrowly however as individual states we decided that we were a frightened people who feared everything different from ourselves and wanted to be protected. This question played out on race, ethnicity, religion, sex and sexuality across the country in different ways. It is still playing out. It however, despite the coverage given to it by the MSM was secondary.
The Shadow Question was the real kicker. It took precedence over all the other questions in overall voting. “What do we want?” That question was prevalent in all the campaigns, but most powerfully in the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Hillary spoke to the question in indirect ways but did not address it face on in the states where it was most important. She addressed it only tangentially and reluctantly in both the primary (where she realized it had become necessary to avoid being defeated in a second primary election) and in the general election. She did not believe it had the power it did, so even though I absolutely believe she would have been best at addressing the question in office, she never really made that case. Instead she had dense policy papers available that nobody or almost nobody undecided read. Talking to actual voters however, it becomes more and more clear how central that question was to their thinking and also how they wanted simple answers to it.
Many liberal elites try to avoid this reality, still. They argue that it's just an excuse to paper over racism or homophobia or ethnocentrism. They assert that most Trump voters were doing better than average, therefore that COULDN’T be the concern. They could not be more wrong. The elites are, unfortunately, not people who know very many people who are not in their own social class. As someone who does, let me assure you - I know many people who did vote for Trump - who have no problem with our being gay, no problem with my mixed race son (and I do mean NO problem - at all) and make enough - but are terrified that the way things are going, either that in the future they won’t, or more importantly, that their children will never be able to. That is a fact. Many of them know Trump lies at a clinical level, they don’t trust many of his decisions and as I have been told by Trump voters from 22 to 60 - they wish he would just shut up - BUT they voted for him, over someone that they knew was better qualified and more experienced, BECAUSE he said that he would somehow save American jobs and make certain that they and their children had a FUTURE, not just a present.
We donated to Hillary, I traveled to other states to campaign for her (we are in a very Blue state), but I cannot fault these people, who are my friends, who I know well, for voting to protect what they want, which they think he will do.
Of course the Shadow question is deeply interwoven in real life with the Technomage’s question: “Where are you going?” That’s the real question as is indicated by the focus of these people I know on what their CHILDREN will have available to them. Where are we going? Can their children, and our children, have a future as good as our own? What do we want, not just now, but for them? What do we want? Where are we going?
== The Conversation
This needs to be a real conversation. I can tell you where we are going now. It’s what I spend my life studying. We are headed, breakneck speed and directly toward a workforce that employees 30% of the available workers - mostly the best educated ones, possibly less, but I have long accepted the thesis of 30%. This is thanks to technology. Technology already has stolen hundreds of millions of jobs globally. It will steal hundreds of millions more as ordering kiosks replace desk clerks at fast food restaurants, as automated picking systems select the products you order, robots package them and drones deliver them. As nanotechnology and 3-dimensional printing conspire with improved robotics and tasked artificial intelligence to eliminate (not restrict, eliminate, outright) the law of scarcity upon which all Capitalism is based (supply and demand do not work if there is no limit to either). As alternative energy, emerging energy technologies too numerous to mention, , and so forth rapidly reduce dependence on fossil fuels and reach parity in price, dropping below fossil fuel prices soon enough, thus creating a temporary boom in Green energy jobs and a continued drop in traditional extraction and refining jobs. And so forth.
These are not pie-in-the-sky technologies, these are technologies that either have, in most cases already been fully developed but are not yet fully deployed, are in the process of deployment, or for the most cutting edge are at the alpha or beta stages. Full deployment of all the technologies I’ve mentioned will occur within 20 years I would predict. The jobs associated? Gone. And, contrary to the “Law of Creative Destruction” - no analyst I know has any prediction for where new, enduring jobs will come from. Instead they predict everyone working as a consultant, or, as one op ed in the New York times suggested, renting one’s rooms and tools to one another - as if that, somehow, could sustain the middle class.
What do we want? Where are we going? One of my own colleagues expressed concern that our own children would not be able to afford food and housing.
What do we want? Where are we going? We are heading into an age (barring a nuclear exchange) of unparalleled abundance - but for who? For the many, or for the few? What has money ever been other than a method of enforcing power for certain people? Do we intend to allow that to continue? Or, in the new abundance, do we intend to create a society in which our children can flourish, even if the political economy looks nothing like what we are used to?
THIS is the burning issue of our time. President-elect Trump spent part of his holiday talking Carrier into keeping some of its jobs in the United States. I give him credit for that, if not for any of his cabinet picks (except maybe… Mitt Romney? I’m hoping.) He did, himself, save a few hundred jobs - if he pursues that tactic he may save thousands. He cannot save a political-economy that is being destroyed, not by outside forces, but rather by changes in the underlying infrastructure of our civilization. I wish him well in the effort, perhaps he can delay for a few years the onset of the malaise that is coming if we do not change the political economy to reflect the realities that are appearing around us. I can but hope.
Far more however I hope for the Conversation that needs to be had (yes, I capitalize it deliberately - it is that important) We need to look at what we want, where we want our society to go, what we want for our children. Envision what we want, and figure out how to get there in the emerging world, regardless of the path. We must do this, or 50 years from now the entire world will look like the worst of the developing world looks now. All the gains will be gone, all the power in the hands of the few, and resistance, impossible.
Who are we? What do we want? Where are we going? Where do we WANT to go?
