Healthcare and highways: Lessons of history forgotten

We Americans have a selective memory. And we trust labels over facts.

Anyone who doubts this only has to look at two words: Infrastructure and healthcare. Infrastructure is supposed to be something that “everyone agrees on.” Who doesn’t want better roads? And who has a problem with the government paying for them?

We view good highways as a human right. Healthcare? Not so much.

But it wasn’t always this way. There was a time, back in the late 1800s, when our roads were in terrible shape. If you wanted to use yesterday’s highways, you had to depend on private businesses to surface and maintain them.

Why would businesses want to do that? The only ones with any incentive were merchants, and manufacturers who needed them to distribute goods. Naturally, the roads used by these merchants and manufacturers were in decent shape. The rest of them were barely passable – if at all. If those businesses weren’t on a direct route, tough luck. You, the ordinary traveler, had to go out of your way to be sure they were getting their money’s worth.

Sometimes, a long way out of your way. Halfway decent roads back then were a maze of twists and turns and double-backs.

The private businesses that forced everyone to go out of their way weren’t in it as a public service. Like today’s insurance companies and drug makers, they wanted to make money. If travelers happened to benefit, that was fine. If they were inconvenienced or got stuck in the mud, that was fine, too. It didn’t matter to them.

Cyclists to the rescue

If you like the fact that today’s roads aren’t a bunch of rutted, muddy dirt trails, you’ve got the bicycle to thank for it.

Cyclists back in the late 1800s weren’t happy about the sorry state of the nation’s roads, so pressed for legislators to dedicate more money to improve what we now call “infrastructure.”

The prospect was expensive. The federal government resisted setting aside money for highways, preferring to kick the can back up the (dirt) road to states, counties and those private businesses.

But the movement picked up steam once farmers joined the cyclists in calling for better roads.

One cycling activist, Isaac Potter, published a plea to farmers detailing the cost of bad roads to their bottom line: He put it at $2.35 billion, which would translate to about $56 billion today – pretty close to Michael Bloomberg’s net worth.

Wagons broke down as a matter of routine; sometimes people were hurt or even killed.

Potter made another point, too: Roads in places like France, Belgium and Italy were well maintained – even country roads. The condition of these foreign roads stood in marked contrast to the terrible shape American highways were in. One early road advocate ranked them alongside Turkey’s roads as the worst in the world.

This was all back around 1900.

Flash forward to today, and the arguments on healthcare are eerily similar. Poor healthcare coverage costs the American economy billions of dollars in lost productivity. When people go bankrupt to pay obscene medical bills, it kills consumer spending: They’re no longer fueling the economy by spending on things like cars and Christmas gifts. And that’s not even mentioning the real price: People without health care suffer. They die. They leave loved ones behind who don’t know what they’ll ever do without them.

More than 100 years ago, other countries were building and maintaining roads while the United States was doing neither. Today, other countries are treating and curing patients, while the United States is – that’s right – doing neither.

The opposition

Back then, Americans responded. Starting in the 1920s, the federal government began kicking in serious money to build and maintain the nation’s highways. As part of that, the feds got to decide where the new highways went.

That didn’t sit too well with the merchants and manufacturers who had controlled where roads were built up to that point. They didn’t like the government deciding to bypass their businesses for the good of those who actually needed to use the road. They did everything they could to stop it from happening.

But they failed.

Today, drug companies and insurers won’t like being bypassed, either. Not for the sake of the people who need to use healthcare. Not for any reason. That’s why they’re fighting the idea of universal healthcare tooth and nail.

We’re all used to government funds paying for our roads. We don’t remember what it’s like before they did. Today, we view good roads as a human right. If we don’t have them, we get mad at the government and demand them. We don’t remember what it was like before the government paid for them, because we weren’t around then.

History and hypocrisy

If we did remember, though, we’d realize it was exactly what it’s like now with healthcare. Other countries provide it; ours doesn’t. Other countries are saving money because they’re willing to invest in something worthwhile. Something noble. We’re not.

If you want to dismiss universal healthcare as “socialism,” you’ll have to dismiss the federal road system, too.

But maybe we should flip things around and look at it the opposite way. What if we started viewing healthcare as human infrastructure? Without it, our society will break down, just as wagons broke down on those muddy, potholed 19th century roads. Our economy will suffer. People will die, too – and a lot more of them.

History forgotten is hypocrisy unleashed.

The history of our highways holds lessons for today’s healthcare crisis. It’s time we start listening and doing something to save the human infrastructure that’s crumbling right before our eyes.

Trump laughs as Democrats do his dirty work for him

Someone needs to tell the Democrats running for president to watch Independence Day. Or maybe brush up on their history of World War II.

See, there’s this concept of banding together against a common enemy that they just don’t seem to understand.

For all the hand-wringing about Donald Trump and how he’s changed the game — and the stakes — in this year’s presidential election, Democrats this primary season are operating as though it’s business as usual.

Instead of focusing their fire on that common enemy, they’ve circled the wagons ... and set their sights on one another. Joe Biden mocks Pete Buttigieg’s inexperience. Buttigieg, Biden, Bloomberg and Klobuchar seek to undermine Bernie Sanders by saying he can’t get elected (even though polls show him running just as well, or better, against Trump than his Democratic rivals).

Candidates spar over universal healthcare, minority rights and other issues — all worthy considerations. But instead of targeting Trump, with whom they vehemently disagree, they’re nitpicking each one another to death. They’re so concerned that maybe “a socialist can’t beat Trump” or “a woman can’t beat Trump” or “a gay man can’t beat Trump” or “a mayor can’t beat Trump” or “an old guy can’t beat Trump” that they’re trying to kill each other off with elephant guns that will be out of ammunition by the time November rolls around.

By that time, Trump will have all these sound bites showing Democrats blasting each other other, and he’ll use them against whoever wins the nomination.

My father, a political science professor, called this phenomenon, “Your own guy says so.” If Buttigieg says Sanders’ talk of universal healthcare is dangerous, Trump can use that. If Biden says Buttigieg lacks the experience to be president, he’ll use that, too. It’s all right there on videotape.

The complicit media

The media, of course, feed into all this, not because it’s in the public interest, but because bare-knuckle brawls make good theater (and ratings!). Forget all the hoopla about CNN or MSNBC carrying water for the Democrats. They’re not out to get Democrats elected. They’re out for ratings ... which is, in fact, the same reason Fox echoes Trumpian talking points. They don’t care about Trump. Not really. They care about their bottom line. Viewers tune in, advertisers buy spots, the network makes money.

Anyone who thinks any network’s foremost mission is to elect this or that candidate is fooling themselves. They’re in it for the Benjamins, plain and simple.

Which is why CNN and MSNBC are helping to destroy the Democrats’ chances of winning, whether they’re willing to admit it or not. Four more years of Trump is the best thing that could happen to them. It perpetuates outrage, which perpetuates viewers, which perpetuates ratings, which keeps the cash flowing.

All those town halls and debates aren’t any kind of public service. They’re aired for the same reason pay-per-view is showing the Wilder-Fury heavyweight rematch this weekend. For the same reason car crashes and fires lead the local evening news. Conflict sells. Brutality raises ratings. They don’t want to see Elizabeth Warren try to play peacemaker among her fellow Democrats, or hear Sanders say he doesn’t care about Hillary Clinton’s damn emails. They want to see Democrats going for the throat. They want to see an embittered Clinton lashing out at Sanders four years after the fact, and they want to see Sanders react.

They absolutely loved the Iowa caucus debacle, because viewers stayed tuned to find out the delayed results, and because it created still more conflict. Then they could pontificate and hand-wring as though they’re above it all. Yeah, right.

And they don’t want Trump out of office. They love the guy, because he’s the archvillain everyone (on the left, anyway) loves to hate. Who are the Avengers without a Thanos? Who’s Batman without the Joker? Trump knows they need him, and he goads them with it, and the Democrats respond with...

Business as usual. Distract one another from the real opponent by getting into a family food fight, while the other guy goes around selling bogus promises of filet mignon dinners at the steakhouse down the street — which is really just a front for a two-bit mob operation.

Democrats are fiddling around while what used to be America burns. The media bring it all right into our living rooms. And Trump’s just laughing all the way to a second term.

Lindsey Graham abandoned his conscience — or maybe he never had one

Dear Senator Graham,

I’m going to put this to you directly: What does Mr. Trump have on you?

I’ve been watching politics a long time. It’s a game in which opportunists routinely “adjust” their positions to catch latest updraft in public opinion. The man you tried to convict and remove from office two decades ago was famous for it. Governing by polls, they called it.

But we’re not talking about your run-of-the-mill Clintonian flip-flop here. We’re talking about a 180-degree turnabout in your opinion of a man he called a “race-baiting xenophobic bigot” and a “kook not fit to be president” just four years ago. Today, you’re one of his most avid supporters. This isn’t a flip-flop; it’s as a transformation that would make any good chameleon green enough with envy to stand out in the greenest rainforest.

A Washington Post story claimed you’d provided some answers to this question: You wanted to “be relevant” and declared, “If you don’t want to get re-elected, you’re in the wrong business.”

I’d say the more appropriate answer is, “If you don’t want to serve the people and the nation’s highest good, you’re in the wrong business.” And that’s what you’ve always said you were doing. You positioned yourself as a person of conscience and, whether or not people agreed with your conclusions, you crafted something of a reputation for following that conscience.

Until now.

Conscience, what conscience?

So, I’m sorry, but I don’t buy your explanation that this is simply a case of political pandering in an attempt to be re-elected. That kind of explanation that would work in explaining your typical, everyday political about-face, but this is something else. Plenty of other legislators fell in lockstep behind the “race-baiting xenophobic bigot,” but they were not the kind of people who boasted of working across the aisle and speaking with an independent voice. You were.

Take your colleague from Texas, Senator Cruz, for an example. He did an about-face on Trump, too – even after Trump threatened to “spill the beans” on his wife (whatever that meant) and smeared his father without justification. But let me point out two important distinctions: First, Mr. Cruz never had the reputation for integrity you cultivated and, second, his support of Trump hasn’t been nearly as public and vocal as yours has been.

I know you’re not a big fan of Senator Cruz: You once likened a choice between him and Mr. Trump in these terms: “It’s like being shot or poisoned.” So, in deference to that statement, I’ll choose a few other examples to illustrate my point: Your conversion regarding Mr. Trump isn’t politics as usual, it’s bizarre, even by Washington’s standards.

It’s tempting to say that, now that Trump’s in office, that you were, in fact, poisoned. But I suspect this poison emanates from within. Here’s why:

Hypocrisy writ large

I invite you, Senator Graham, to think of your colleagues who have earned reputations as people of conscience. Imagine if Bernie Sanders repudiated democratic socialism and became a Republican. Or Rand Paul started speaking out in favor of foreign intervention and tax increases. Imagine if the late Senator John McCain had started decided to oppose all campaign finance reform. These are men who, it’s clear, have held to their beliefs regardless of which way the political winds were blowing, and you depicted yourself as one of their number. If any of them did what I’ve just described, they would be labeled the biggest hypocrites in Washington.

But now, I’m afraid you’ve got that title all to yourself.

What you said about Trump being a “race-baiting xenophobic bigot” could have just as easily been said about David Duke. You know, the former KKK grand wizard. It was unequivocal. If you were wrong about it, you owe Mr. Trump the most abject of public apologies. If you were right, you owe that same apology to the American people. But since Mr. Trump doesn’t believe in apologies, and you are now one of his unapologetic disciples, I don’t expect you’ll issue one – even to him.

I’m even less optimistic you’ll offer one to the American people, and at this point, it doesn’t really matter, because that reputation you built as a “man of conscience” is pretty much toast. If your mysterious about-face regarding Mr. Trump hadn’t incinerated it, your willingness to stand by while he threw your supposed friend, Senator McCain, under the bus most certainly would have. Friends don’t act like that; assholes do.

Two possibilities

So, I’ll ask you again: What does Mr. Trump have on you? Think carefully before you answer, because if you say, “nothing,” there’s only one real alternative: That you were never a person of conscience in the first place, and it was all just a brazen act from the beginning. That would make you the worst kind of political troll. Worse than Clinton or Cruz or even Trump himself, because Trump – while a shameless con man – never pretended to be a man of conscience. You did.

That leaves us with two possibilities: First, that you are a true man of conscience who’s been undone by something so dark and despicable that you forsook that conscience and hitched yourself to Trump’s amoral bandwagon. I’m not talking about your rumored-and-denied homosexuality; that’s no longer (thankfully) the political or social liability it once was, even among Republicans.

This would have to be a whole lot more damaging than that. It would have to be downright humiliating. I have no idea what this sword of Damocles might be, and perhaps it doesn’t even exist. But if it doesn’t, we’re left with only one other option: that you never a man of conscience in the first place. That you’re an even bigger huckster than the “Art of the Deal” guy himself, and that your entire, well-cultivated image was nothing but a fraud from the outset.

Those are your choices. Think hard and choose wisely.  I’ll be waiting for your answer – not that I ever expect to get it.

The economy, identity politics and the collapse of neoliberalism

Back in August of 2015, activists with the group Black Lives Matter disrupted two rallies in Seattle for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. The group succeeded in keeping Sanders from speaking about his agenda.

The surreal part of all this is that the agenda in question wasn’t some far-right attempt to marginalize African Americans. It was just the opposite: It included such proposals as free college education and a $15 minimum wage – proposals that, if implemented, would have helped poor and working class African Americans more than anything the other major candidates were suggesting.

As of 2010, the poverty rates for African Americans were 27.4 percent, the highest among any racial or ethnic group. Yet despite this, African Americans overwhelmingly preferred Hillary Clinton over Sanders in the Democratic primaries, 76 percent to 23 percent. Some of this might have been chalked up to name recognition, and Clinton certainly had a stronger ground game among black voters.

But on policy, it’s hard to argue that Sanders’ proposals wouldn’t have done more to lift African Americans out of poverty than Clinton’s.

Meanwhile, Sanders actually won a slightly greater proportion of the white vote than Clinton did, appealing to many of the same working-class white Americans whose votes Donald Trump used as the touchstone for his victory over Clinton in the general election.

Where neoliberalism went wrong

So, what happened? Why did poor and working class blacks vote so overwhelmingly for Clinton in the primary, while poor and working class whites turned out in droves for Trump in the general election.

The answer seems obvious, although it won’t be popular among some of my readers: People on both sides of the racial divide have emphasized that divide to such an extent that racial identity has become more important in defining political allegiances than actual policy - even if that policy might help both sides.

Who benefits? Anyone wishing to maintain the economic status quo … which isn’t really a status quo at all, because the wealth gap between rich and poor has continued to grow. And it’s done so with both a Republican (George W. Bush) and a Democrat (Barack Obama) in the White House.

Before anyone yells “false equivalency” – an increasingly common and often fallacious rejoinder that’s intended to shame people into shutting their mouths – I’m not equating Bush’s catastrophic economic policies with Obama’s efforts, which did succeed in bringing the unemployment rate down substantially and stimulating an economic recovery. Few people would (or should) argue that even a sluggish recovery is better than the worst economic downturn since the 1930s, but neither should anyone turn a blind eye to the increasing wage gap and unabated downturn in quality of life for poor and working class Americans of all races.

Yet that’s precisely what the party regulars on both sides did. Jobs continued to be shipped overseas. Mainstream politicians on both sides of the aisle all but ignored the economically fueled Occupy movement. Everything was business as usual.

Going on the defensive

This might not have been surprising from the right, which has long taken a pro-business, anti-labor stance. What is more surprising is that the left hung working class America out to dry. Tired of being branded “socialists,” they stopped defending unions and started to look more and more like proponents of what might be called trickle-down light.

Then, when Sanders drew a large following not just despite but because of his self-identified socialism, they ignored it. And when Trump took up a populist tone in the general election, they tried to ignore that, too. Neither candidate fit into their preconceived notions about how Americans should behave.

Those preconceived notions originated with their decision to abandon the struggle for equality in favor of a struggle for identity. In doing so, they put a premium on lip service to various racial, ethnic and other groups while putting economic concerns on the back burner – even though it was those very concerns that could have united poor and blue-collar blacks, whites, Latinos, LGBT individuals, women and anyone else struggling to make a living.

The result? Low-income black voters weren’t comfortable with Sanders because, even though his policies would have benefited them more than Clinton’s, he didn’t speak the language of identity that the Democratic Party has spoken for more than two decades now. Low-income whites, meanwhile, were turned off by Clinton’s rhetoric precisely because it did put a premium on identity, rather than addressing their concerns about how to put bread on the table.

Neoliberals aren’t entirely to blame for this. Bigotry plays a huge role. African Americans face troubling issues that most white voters don’t have to deal with: social prejudice; police profiling; unjustly harsh sentencing and disproportionately high incarceration rates. The list could go on. Where neoliberalism has failed is in reacting to bigotry defensively, through identity politics, rather than going on the offensive to improve the lives of those targeted by the bigots.

Clinton and the neoliberal Democrats have spoken to these issues – all the while ignoring the economic issues that facilitate prejudice as much as anything else by locking people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. As mentioned earlier, African Americans constitute the highest percentage of those at the bottom.

As economic status solidifies, so does social prejudice. Just look at the rigid Hindu caste system if you want to know where this process ends up.

Identity vs. behavior

Putting identity over equality is, of course, an attractive message to people who have been discriminated against based on the color of their skin, their gender, their sexual orientation. But there’s a difference between standing up for a specific group of people and standing up against bigotry, no matter how it manifests itself.

This is a crucial distinction. The former course, pursued by neoliberals, focuses on defending identity, while the latter focuses on ending bigoted behavior that targets people because of their identity, regardless of how or against whom it manifests itself. Ultimately, it’s not anyone’s identity that is – or should be – the issue, it’s the behavior of the bigot.

So, while the neoliberals have been preoccupied with defending something that shouldn’t need to be defended, guess what? The bigotry that’s been condemned for decades has become normalized. It’s still hard for me to imagine that the American people were so willing to elect a candidate such as Trump, who expressed such unapologetically prejudiced views. But even when the Democrats pointed this out, they were viewed by many as doing so not because they were against bigotry, but because they were trying to enforce the identity politics of political correctness. They came across as playing politics, rather than trying to further the cause of struggling Americans.

Voters, not candidates

Trump and Sanders had one thing in common, as pundits have frequently pointed out: They’ve branded themselves as populists, champions of ordinary, struggling, roll-up-your-sleeves Americans. Sanders lost in the primary because he was competing in a party that long ago abandoned its working-class roots for the sake of embracing identity politics. Trump won the general election precisely by repudiating this gospel of identity and focusing on the economy.

He cast himself as St. George, eager to the dragon of politics as usual, and the millions of voters believed him.

Yes, Clinton won the popular vote, but I’ve had yet to hear anyone argue that she did so by presenting a hopeful message to working-class America. The message she did spread in that regard was largely borrowed – reluctantly and less enthusiastically, it seemed – from Sanders. More likely, Clinton won the popular vote not because of her economic proposals, but because of Trump’s glaring deficiencies in experience, character and common decency.

Without these issues to contend with, it’s a fair guess that any candidate without Trump’s monumental flaws who succeeded in addressing working class concerns would have won the election in a landslide. Party be damned.

Not all Trump voters are bigots. Most of them aren’t. But they’re so concerned with an economic situation they actually share with many Democrats that they overlooked the unprecedented divisiveness of Trump’s campaign to vote for him. By the same token, not all Democrats are tone-deaf to the idea that fighting for equality is more important than clinging to the divisiveness of identity politics. If they were, more than 43 percent of the party wouldn’t have voted for Sanders, who remained in the hunt for the nomination into the summer. (This despite being a virtual unknown who lacked national recognition at the outset of the campaign, not being taken seriously by the media for months and facing active opposition from the party apparatus.)

The sad thing about all this is that bigotry and identity politics have succeeded in dividing Americans with shared economic concerns by pitting both ends against the middle. I have no doubt that, had Sanders won the Democratic nomination, he would have won many of the same voters who supported Trump in the general election, not because he and Trump are anything alike, but because so many voters who backed both men shared the same concerns.

If the 2016 election taught us anything, it’s that the candidates themselves don’t matter nearly as much as the concerns of the voters. We ignore them at our own peril.

As a nation, we can recognize that inequality is an issue that concerns us all. Or we can continue to be pawns in a game of divide-and-conquer that sustains both bigotry of the far right and the identity politics of neoliberalism while accomplishing little to address the shared concerns of those who are struggling.

The choice is ours. I hope we make the right one.

Trump's secret weapon: The marginalized American worker

Hillary Clinton’s mistake was not taking to heart the phrase that defined her husband's success in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.” That was a long time ago, but it’s not as though she hadn’t been reminded of that reality since then – by her opponent in the primaries, Bernie Sanders.

She didn’t listen to the fears and frustrations that working-class Americans were expressing through Sanders, so voters in the general election made her listen. By voting for Donald Trump.

Much has been made about James Comey's email letter, about questions concerning Clinton’s honesty and trustworthiness, about the “baggage” she brought to the race. She was, without question, a deeply flawed candidate with very low approval ratings. But to blame any of these factors for her defeat would be to miss the real message sent by voters who elected Trump.

Don’t forget: Trump’s approval ratings were even lower, and a majority of voters considered him poorly qualified to be president. It wasn’t as though they were ignorant of this and wanted to vote for arrogant narcissist who bragged about groping women and insulted veterans, disabled people and religious and ethnic minorities. Some of them, no doubt, did, and yes, that’s scary. These are the same people who are defacing property with Nazi and anti-immigrant graffiti in the election’s aftermath.

But I’m willing to bet the vast majority of Trump voters didn’t support him because of these views, but in spite of them. Sure, some closet racists have been emboldened by his victory. But I simply won’t believe that half the people in this country are a bunch of bigots with a secret desire to perpetrate violence on anyone who’s different.

A marginalized working class

It isn’t as though the Republican Party machine wanted Trump. They wanted someone who would continue to ignore the working class and kowtow to corporate interests (their initial choice, you’ll recall, was Jeb Bush).  Whether Trump’s campaign rhetoric about improving the lives of the working class was sincere or merely lip-service to America’s blue-collar workers remains to be seen. The proof will be in the pudding. Like most critical thinkers, I’ll believe it when I see it.

But the point is, whether it was sincere or a bunch of B.S., it worked. The Democratic Party apparatus threw its working-class base under the bus by ignoring Sanders’ critiques in the primaries and skewing the nominating process against him, in favor of Clinton. Sanders did such a good job of highlighting their concerns – based on decades of consistently doing so – that by the time Clinton agreed to adopt some of his ideas as her platform, it came across as a halfhearted, politically motivated case of “me too.”

That’s where the trust issues hurt her most. A lot of people simply didn’t believe she was sincere about helping the working class and ignored her ideas to do so – many of them lifted from Sanders’ campaign – because they seemed like just another case of political expediency. Clinton’s (and the Democrats’) credibility on this issue was so low that vast numbers of voters preferred a man from the billionaire class who has exploited his own workers in the past and run a series of apparent con games, such as Trump University.

That’s how low Clinton’s credibility was, because again, it isn’t as though voters didn’t know these things about Trump. It isn’t as though they approved of them. It’s just that they mattered a lot less than the hope, even a faint one, that Trump might actually improve their situation. Clinton failed to inspire such hope and represented the status quo – in part because of her status as the “anointed” establishment candidate and in part because of her record.

Sanders’ endorsement of her held little weight, because it was perceived as “what was expected” politically and more an attempt to stop Trump than a full-throated advocacy for Clinton. The damage had already been done in the primaries and long before that.

Trump makes the sale

The worst thing the Democratic Party leadership did in its nominating process was to actively promote Clinton as its candidate before she got the nomination. Not only did this seem to dismiss Sanders’ concerns about the working class – which Trump later appropriated – it also lent credence to Trump’s later claims that the system was “rigged.” Never mind that a general election is far different (and infinitely harder to control) than a primary election. The impression was there, and Trump exploited it.

He saw an opportunity and seized it.

It’s true that some working-class people are redneck racists. But most of them are just hard-working folks who got tired of going unrepresented by a Republican Party that long ago sold out to corporate greed and a Democratic Party that first stopped listening, then had the temerity to shush their spokesman within the party, Sanders.

Had either party listened to working Americans, we wouldn’t have Trump. Both parties were, and probably still are, tone-deaf to the concerns of the working class. They’re caught up in elitism, ideologies and feeling entitled to the support of people they’ve abandoned. This is what the voters told them by repudiating every establishment candidate in this election cycle.

If you’ve read my earlier entries, you know my opinions of Donald Trump; there’s no need to rehash them here, because they’re not the point. The point is that millions of Americans felt ignored, dismissed and taken for granted by the two political parties. They’re not just a “basket of deplorables,” as Clinton called them, or Mitt Romney’s 47 percent who don’t matter. They’re people with real concerns that the two major parties have failed to address.

This kind of thing has happened before. There have been populist movements under the likes of Huey Long, William Jennings Bryan, Ross Perot and even Teddy Roosevelt – but none of them (not even Roosevelt) won the presidency as populist candidates.

Trump did. That’s not an endorsement on Trump’s character or moral fiber, it’s an indication that Americans today are more fed up with the political establishment than ever before. They got mad as hell, and they weren’t going to take it anymore. That’s why Trump won.

That’s where we’re sitting where we are today: because it really is the economy, stupid.