Yesterday, I referenced the great economist Joseph Schumpeter in characterizing Trump as the consummate entrepreneur. Herewith, more from Schumpeter:
"We shall understand, therefore, that we do not observe in the entrepreneur's position the emergence of all those affective traits which are the glory of all kinds of social leadership. Add to this the precariousness of the economic position both of the individual entrepreneur and of the group, and the fact that when his economic success raises him up socially he has no cultural tradition or attitude to fall back on, but moves about in society as an upstart, whose ways are readily laughed at, and we shall understand why this type has never been popular..."
A certain MrBlackChestnut posted a comment to yesterday's post in which he brilliantly analyzed the sources of Trump's success in the election and concluded with the prediction that Trump will be unable to deliver on his promises to the white blue-collar class.
Indeed, it will be darned difficult for Trump the Entrepreneur to make good on his vague but sweeping promises to the white blue-collar class that lifted him to power. Just how hard is captured in an article published yesterday in the Chronicle of Higher Education under the headline "What a Michigan County's Switch to Trump Says About the Limits of Higher Education."
The article opens with the observation that "In July 2009, during the depths of the recession, President Obama traveled to Macomb County, Mich., to unveil a plan to invest $12 billion in the nation's community colleges." It continued, "Mr. Obama called for preparation, in Michigan and elsewhere, for the 'new jobs of the 21st century.'"
"Time and again," promised Obama, "when we placed our bet for the future on education, we have prospered as a result...."
Meanwhile, that summer, automotive jobs in the state plummeted 30 percent.One observer, a Michigan State economics professor, is quoted to wit, "Michigan is where the middle class was invented." Indeed, so it was with my Great Uncle Eddy, for whom the auto plants and the UAW where his tickets into a comfortable middle-class life.
I asked a colleague of mine yesterday if he knew of a solution. He gave me the Obama panacea: training. His comment: "In Chattanooga, Volkswagen built a plant and insisted that the workers it hired be properly trained." Did he not hear himself? "Volkswagen built a plant." First the plant, then the training. Training on faith that the jobs will follow seems naive, if not disingenuous. Similarly, we have allowed college students to run up significant loan debts on the faith and hope that the good jobs will be out there waiting. Instead, far too many of them have had to take from their less educated contemporaries the service jobs that are all that's available.
There is another aspect of jobs in heavy industry that almost never gets mentioned. This is the pride and self-esteem that such blue-collar workers enjoyed. My American Studies Ph.D. Dissertation bears a title that announces that it's primarily a study of ethnic groups across the centuries in my home county of Carbon in central-eastern Pennsylvania. But the thread running through all the chapters is the coal industry. The dissertation takes Carbon County's story up to 1954, when the anthracite mines and the railroads that serviced them began to fail fatally.
I interviewed a number of old miners, including my own father, who died of miner's asthma. I realize that my sample was small and based on convenience. However, I believe these old timers where representative of their group. And what I heard uniformly were stories that expressed great pride and self-satisfaction from the hard and dangerous work they did. I discovered a kind of awe of the mines and the underworld they had built and inhabited. JRR Tolkien, who drew his characters from the world he witnessed around him, gave us the dwarfs, who mined the great mountains of Middle Earth and took enormous pride in their achievements. Weren't they based on the English coal miners of Tolkien's day? I believe they were.
Trump says his three priorities are health care, immigration and jobs. I have no comments on healthcare at this time. But jobs and immigration are inexorably interwoven. The blue-collar workers who carried him over the top on Tuesday night have observed for decades a balance of trade that has plummeted them from the middle class: immigrants imported, industrial jobs exported.
Can this be reversed? It won't be easy. But opportunities exist. I'll write about some of them in future posts.
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