In retrospect what happened should not have been such a surprise. We Democrats should have seen it coming for a long time. We failed to notice, or just didn’t pay any attention to the devastation and pain we were allowing to happening in the once great cities of our industrial core. Proud, industrious people that filled the factories that once made everything that now comes in boxes that say “Made in China” have been cast aside like yesterday’s newspaper. These people who built this nation, that during election time we could only refer to as “uneducated white men” worked as hard at learning their trade as any mid-level manager did earning a degree. But because of some inexplicable liberal elite bias we decided that college was an education and trade apprenticeship was not.  I know this to be not true because I completed an apprenticeship and became a journeyman machinist myself.

This election is not a fluke. We began this journey in 1980 with the election of Reagan. There has always been a struggle in the economy between the two equally necessary components, labor, and capital. Capital has always had the upper hand for obvious reasons, they control the money. As long as you keep labor poor enough and dependent enough and isolated enough, they can be easily controlled. Before Reagan, our industrial workers were making a good middle-class wage, had decent working conditions and, because of a strong union, could bargain for a fair share of the economy generated by their shared contribution with capital. The booming economy was driven by equal contribution from both labor and capital and in those days because of the strength of collective bargaining labor was able to demand a better partnership with capital in the business. Representatives from the workforce had a place at the table in the boardroom.

An axiom taught in most business schools is the number one goal of business is to maximize profit without consideration of anything else which is accomplished by cutting expenses. The other axiom is that labor is an expense and not an asset. Business’s long-term strategic plan has been to, as much as possible, eliminate the labor component from the economic partnership. The only way to do that is to replace the expensive labor in this country with cheap labor in third world countries. It is important to understand that this strategy has nothing to do with business survival or sufficient profitability. It is only about making a maximum bottom-line profit. And the only way to achieve it is to change the distribution balance of business by reducing the share to labor and increase the share to capital. Basically a re-distribution of wealth. Or rather, reverse the direction of the re-distribution that started with Roosevelt’s New Deal.

What they were talking about was a complete restructuring of the way America’s economy works from manufacturing to one of distribution. It took time and preparation to pull it off. For one thing, it took a lot of government action to make it possible, a lot of pro-business legislative action. To get that kind of business support, they needed a lot of Republicans. Here’s why. Business leaders knew from the beginning that the kind of economic upheaval they wanted to pull off would do exactly what it, put hundreds of thousands of skilled factory workers out of work. But, the factory workers were all Democrats so they thought their Democratic representation in Congress would keep their jobs safe. The other and more important thing they had was a strong lobbying union representing them and keeping the Democratic legislators on the side of workers. That venerable “Blue Wall” stayed pretty much intact long after it stopped protecting their industrial base constituents.  The other thing that had to happen was emasculate the unions, get rid of their power to protect their members.

I would say that the start of putting the plan in motion was first visible to the untrained eye with the election of Ronald Reagan. He was the first to openly begin working to end collective bargaining rights. The misleading argument against unions was clothed in the deception of the “Right to Work” title of the laws that were passed in each state. The expectation in the title was that it gives everyone the right to work. Actually, a more accurate title would be “Right to Work for less.” What these laws do is prevent a majority of employees in a workforce from voting to close their shop to non-union members. If the workers in a workplace do not have the power to stand in solidarity, bargain for the whole and strike as a whole for their share of the profit they produce, then the company (capital) has all of the power and the employee (Labor) has none. This is not a fair split of the two equal partners in the prosperity of the company. The Right-to-work laws effectively got rid of one obstruction to the grand plan of moving the manufacturing jobs offshore. The only thing left to do was to get big-money Republicans in control of the government. That came with the Republican sweep in the 1980 election of Reagan.

Before companies could actually start moving to Asia, Mexico and all the rest, there needed to be agreements between America and the other countries that protected the assets of the corporations moving the jobs. Since the trade deals were only for the benefit of the businesses involved, the legislation was written by their legal staff and not the sponsoring legislators. I doubt the Republicans (and a few Democrats) that pushed the bills through even read them. The Representatives of the industrial states didn’t understand that either their constituents were being slow-walked off a cliff, they bought into the global capitalist lie that it was good for the country or they were outvoted. Who knows whether it was ignorance, greed or malice that motivated them. The large block of our population who were instrumental in making America great in the first place were pushed out of our American dream simply because a few people with influence thought to maximize their profit was more important than the economic viability of the entire industrial region and the well-being of its people. I am embarrassed as a Democrat that probably the last nail in the coffin was legislation signed into law by President Clinton.

So, why would anyone be surprised that after so many people who have watched their once grand cities and beautiful towns deteriorate and crumble; their once-bustling factories shuttered and falling down, would be angry with the system. Here in Seattle where I grew up I served an apprenticeship and worked as a machinist for twenty years. It saddened me to watch the factories go. All of the shops I had worked in except Boeing are gone. We built the tunnel boring machine that put in the original bus tunnel in the 1960’s that was the start of our subway system. The machines they’re using here now were built in Asia because we don’t make them anymore. We had companies that built the best forest product machinery in the world, now all gone. I was lucky enough to retrain, but it is unrealistic to think an entire population can do that. Like I said I understand why so many were mad as hell and were not going to trust any politician. They had their whole segment of the population raped and left to die by all of them for decades. When Trump came along and said he was going to make America great again, and they thought back with tears in their eyes and remembered when it was, why wouldn’t they take a chance on him? I’m not sure in their circumstance I wouldn’t have done the same.