Trump, and The Grapes of Wrath.

Losing hurts.  Trump is doing a better job than Democrats at communicating he cares about people being squeezed and crushed by progress.

From the movie

Observations on re-reading The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, 1939

In the mid-1960s high school students were assigned The Grapes of Wrath in their English literature classes. At that point the story was nearly fresh, just 25 years old. The novel starts with dispossession: dust bowl farmers losing their land in bank foreclosures, their homes, and way of life destroyed by drought, technological change, corporate policy, and debt . The sharecroppers were told the banks took possession of their land and homes, that they were now trespassers, and they needed to leave. Readers fated to grow up to be liberal and compassionate sympathized with the family, not the banks and the great global forces that made 40-acre sharecrop farming uneconomical. 

The sharecroppers got "tractored" off their land, and that started another great force, the movement of people from mid-continent to California, and there they watched food be destroyed in front of hungry people to keep the price up, the response to yet another great force, overproduction and the law of supply and demand.

The tidal forces weren't personal, but its effects were felt personally. People were crushed, and it was a moral catastrophe. John Steinbeck wrote: "There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is sorry here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success."

Dispossession continues. Economists and experts and writers of books call it "creative destruction."  People looking at the big picture from a place of economic comfort and job tenure look at the creation.  People being displaced experience the destruction.

Great forces, great trends, displacement. In the past three decades container ships made transport of goods from China to America inexpensive and reliable, making it practical for manufacturing to move offshore. Unskilled labor lost bargaining power with employers, because they were now in competition with workers from around the world. More value-added jobs required higher education, taking place simultaneously with states dis-investing in colleges, making them expensive in relation to the earning power of young people. Jobs in extraction--forestry, mining, petroleum--get pressure from urbanites concerned about environmental degradation. Technology and synergies continued the movement of jobs toward urban centers. White males see themselves losing their special place in the social order, with women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, indeed everyone claiming equality and pointing to past injustices.

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People being squeezed by these changes do not to look at "creative destruction" and celebrate it.  They feel the dis-possession and they resent the loss.  

One of the truths I learned as a Financial Advisor is that clients experience the pain of loss at about five times the intensity of the joy of gain.  Once an account hits a new high, that account number becomes the new mental floor, and any pull-back from that floor is experienced as loss, painful loss. Clients took 25% gains nearly for granted. Five percent losses cause distress.

Alan Pavlik, who writes the blog "Just Above Sunset "(www.justabovesunset.wordpress.com) wrote about people squeezed by the the great forces of change, "those who had felt that the universe was laughing at them behind their backs, telling them they had no right to be here--because machines or Asians could do their jobs better and faster and cheaper, or because they weren't black or own or gay or cool, or because they liked  NACAR and hated cities and fancy-pants experts. They lined up behind Donald Trump."

These are the dispossessed, the current version of the people pushed off their farms in the Dust Bowl era.

Democrats--progressives--have associated themselves with the big forces, the forces of progress. They say world trade is generally good or at least inevitable; that racial tolerance and integration and diversity are good and just and inevitable; that high-skilled jobs requiring education are good and the inevitable future of American jobs; that immigration is good and a fact of life; that the demographic changes that displace white men from primacy are good and and firmly in place and only fair to everyone else. Trustworthy experts say so. It is peer-reviewed.

Democrats think of themselves as being highly concerned with the pain of destruction.  They are the compassion party. For good reason, they are associated with the side of dealing with the great forces rather than objecting to them.  After all, they are inevitable tidal forces.  One adjusts to the tide; one does not deny it. 

Trump fights the tide.  People can see him do it.   It is simple and understandable. 

Fight China. Fight bad trade deals. Fight internationalism. Fight for coal. Fight for logging. Fight for blue collar manufacturing. Fight to stop environmentalists. Fight uppity blacks and women and Latinos and transgenders. Fight to stop immigration from "shit hole" countries. Fight for God and the flag and the national anthem. Fight to make America great again.  

Trump showing he is fighting the tide

The closing words of The Grapes of Wrath portray an image of how humanity can survive these great forces, human compassion and generosity, with a controversial image the book publishers had urged Steinbeck to revise, a young woman feeding breast milk to the hungry man. Democrats may think they appear to be the generous woman, the party of humanity and compassion.  And in contrast, look at Trump, brutal, vicious, inhumane, shockingly lacking in human compassion.  

Maybe Democrats see it wrong.

The way Trump's base--and perhaps a great many beyond the base who also feel uneasy about the changes happening in America--see Trump as a person fighting for the interests of real people whose situation is being crushed in the maw of progress and inevitable forces. In Trump's framing, it is people versus sterile forces. Trump signals he is with the people fighting for people, while Democrats are stuck communicating adjustment to the great forces of change. Democrats want retraining; Trump wants things back the way things were.

People being squeezed by the economic and social change do not necessarily see Democrats as "realistic' and fact-based, and therefore compassionate in doing what will actually solve a long rage problem. They see them as appeasers, as weak. There is a reason thousands of people go to Trump rallies. They see Trump as fighting for them by fighting the tide and the experts.

Democrats under-estimate Trump and his appeal at their peril.