The Resistance Needs an Economic Program

Much has been made of the economic distress of Trump supporters, and that can’t be ignored.

We’ve staggered through the first traumatic weeks of Trump as President. We’re tempted by the daily crises he throws out but we can’t lose sight of the long game. Yes, we have to save the refugees and get this insane and irrational ban reversed, especially as applied to refugees who have been waiting for years, were finally vetted for the U.S., and were just waiting to get their plane tickets. That is a cruelty beyond imagination.

But we also need to mobilize long-term and to do that, we need to think about what was wrong as well as what was right with the world Trump is trying to dismantle.

Much has been made of the economic distress of Trump supporters. People who have been left behind by globalization. Who live in towns, previously vibrant and bustling, now shuttered ghost towns. Researchers found a staggering overlap between countries that voted for Trump and countries with high levels of premature death among middle-aged whites from diseases of despair from alcohol and opioid addictions.

So the resistance needs an economic program. An economic program that works without demonizing immigrants. More jobs have been lost to automation and computers than to immigrants. Let’s leave aside the question of H1B for a moment to focus on manufacturing. Globalization is designed to foster “comparative advantage.” In the 1990’s, Paul Krugman wrote a famous essay called “Ricardo’s Difficult Idea,” in which he noted that this is a concept that even smart people have difficulty wrapping their head around. It is this idea that makes arguments about free trade complex and difficult.

Comparative advantage means that countries will focus on what they do relatively BEST — whether it is winemaking or watchmaking or heavy manufacturing. And then — the theory is — they will concentrate their energies on those things that they do relatively best and leave the other stuff to countries that do that stuff relatively best to other stuff. This is supposed to make individual economies more efficient and in the long run knit those economies together globally. But it doesn’t address the problem of what happens to the watchmaker when better watches are made somewhere else. The knee-jerk reaction to international trade is protectionism. But this does not always work out well in practice.

Let’s be clear. One of the root origins of Trump’s victory lie in the 2008 economic crisis, a crisis caused by some extremely dubious actions taken by major banks. Obama stabilized system but basically left it in place. None of the criminals who orchestrated subprime loans and mortgage-backed securities went to jail. Millions of people lost their savings and had to downsize their expectations. But none of the people who caused this pain paid for it in any way. They became richer and the poor became poorer. And the middle-class began to drink and take pain-killers, on the way to its disappearance.

We need to come up with an alternative program to the 2008 bailouts of large banks. It’s not too late, because people are still suffering from the repercussions. We need to show that we “get” it and have an alternative to Trump. But here we have to be imaginative here and really come up with an alternative to Trump. Is there a way for America to revitalize the rust belt? How would that look? Is there a way to retrain the inhabitants of the rust belt, so that they have job skills they can take to market and live on? Can we educate them for new careers, if their old careers are not coming back? If automation is transforming production at all levels, do we need to think about other means of supporting people so they can live with dignity? What about unions? The double-speak “right to work” laws arguably violate international labor standards. Eventually, we need to get into the international financial system and what it would take to reform it.

The resistance needs an economic program — who’s working on it, and who wants to try?

Elizabeth A. Wilson, Human Rights Lawyer, Rutgers Law School, @eawilson11111

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