A musing Beam

This is the fifth installment of a series of posts on lessons we progressives should take on the election. The overview is here . As I mentioned in the original post, though there were many factors that led to the Democrats not retaining the White House in 2017, one major factor was losing the Rust Belt. The Democrats have not found a solution to the problem of union manufacturing jobs disappearing, and candidate Trump flipped the Republican script and went anti-free trade .   Somebody was listening to the working class, and it wasn’t the Democrats, and that was possibly the deciding factor.   Ignoring this constituency and trying to placate blue-collar factory workers with training grants was insulting, most importantly because it simply doesn’t work.   They believe that NAFTA and free trade let foreigners steal their jobs. Of course, the jobs didn’t go to Mexico or China, and it wasn’t free trade that created the problems. Protectionism might create a small uptick in manufa

This is the fourth installment of a series of posts on lessons we progressives should take. The overview is here .   NOTE:  I took a long hiatus for several personal reasons.  The entire series was already written a few months after the 2016 Presidential election, but I'm updating as needed as I post the ones as yet unpublished.  Surprisingly little has changed.   One of President Trump’s main slogans during the campaign was to “drain the swamp.”   The swamp was Washington, and draining it meant removing the corrupting influences, like lobbyists. We won’t be diving into why I think he has made no real attempt to actually fulfill that promise, but instead, let’s focus on why it resonated.   Congress has an abysmal popularity number.   As Arnold points out in this humorous (but slightly NSFW) video , cockroaches and herpes have higher poll numbers.   The President’s are better than that, but still more people dislike him than like him.   For this discussion, let’s define gerry