Briefly Noted: Three Reasons Trump Wins 2020

At Zerohedge this morning there's an article on the 2020 election that I found quite informative regarding how elections work. It's long, but I want to focus on the part that discusses the interplay between Impeachment Theater and real policy--specifically USMCA. Here's a link to the full article: The Three Main Reasons Trump Can't Lose 2020 – Dispelling Nonsense-Polls & Wishful-Thinking.

Basically, the author maintains that many key matrixes showed the country actually trending conservative since 2000. GOPers managed to avoid reaping the full benefits of that trend by their embrace of the predatory crony capitalists fueled by Clinton's anti-labor policies--NAFTA in particular. Dems, OTOH, were able to create a "buzz" surrounding Obama that distracted independents from the fact that Obama continued to support that same class of crony capitalists. It was a Uniparty thing. Trump, of course, changed all that, by creating a "buzz" around his policies that went right to the concerns of the disenfranchised working class.

So now we come to Impeachment Theater. Impeachment Theater was intended to appeal to the left, college educated, low-info boomers who watch Rachel Maddow. That appeal was necessary because that's a key part of the Dem base, but in making that appeal through Impeachment Theater the Dems inevitably alienated another key part of their base--labor. And that part of the base is the key part that actually does the get-out-the-vote work of walking the precincts and generating the necessary "buzz" that allows the Dems to win elections in a basically conservative country.

As a result, Pelosi found herself in the position of having to do Impeachment Theater while at the same time trying to hitch a ride on Trump's USMCA band wagon that's hugely popular. But the voters aren't fooled any more, nor are the labor precinct walkers likely to gin up the type of "buzz" that can reverse what Trump started in 2016.

Here's a key passage:

Looking at Pelosi’s statements and methods, it would appear that the process [of Impeachment Theater] left Democrats looking extremely partisan to the detriment of getting the business of the country done. That business included the USMCA, the Mexico-Canada Agreement that redefines a host of matters previously mishandled by Bill Clinton’s tremendously unpopular NAFTA. Why this seems to be the case – Trump was in the process of getting his USMCA through congress, and with high support from organized labor. As we consistently explain, Democrats rely on organized labor not only for votes, but more critically for their entire ground campaigns, especially making phone calls to other voters, and precinct walking during the campaign and on Election Day. That labor always opposed NAFTA and generally supports the USMCA is critical. The key line in Pelosi’s post impeachment charade statement, regarding why they were not actually going to send the articles to the Senate and therefore complete the process of impeaching the president, was that she said specifically that they needed instead to prioritize passing the USMCA. 

Imagine that for a moment. Because of the relationship between labor and the Democrat Party, it was necessary for Democrats to appear as its champion, even that it was their idea in the first place. This means that Democrats had the practical wisdom to understand that their impeachment charade did not appeal to blue collar Democrat voters, but in fact would work against them. What they needed in part in the impeachment, apart from implementing their strategy of a thousand cuts, was to energize college educated upper middle-class boomers, which form the bulk of the Rachel Maddow, and Democrat leaning mainstream media consumer demographic. While these people control work-place politics and effectively police water-cooler talk, this back-fires. Voting in the US is secret ballot – and so with this class in control of people’s ability to remain employed, unenthusiastic, rehearsed, regurgitated, manufactured ‘orange man bad’ utterances are more commonly heard than they are truly believed. People say one thing at work to keep their job, and then vote another way on Election Day. 

But the USMCA fiasco surrounding the impeachment tells us a lot. Eight years of Bill Clinton and decades of his NAFTA has been symptomatic of the Democrat’s anti-labor politics. Democrats from that time onward invested their political capital into developing socialism. However, they didn’t develop this in the US, but in China – while in the US a crony class grew up and lined their own pockets from it all. This is something which is perhaps, in a strange turn of events, quite good for China and many other developing parts of the world including Africa. But that has come at the expense not of America’s wealthy ‘bourgeoisie’, but rather its own ‘working class’. Bill Clinton was supposed to work to reverse 12 years of Reagan-Bush, whose anti-labor policies amounted to one of the single greatest austerity campaigns in US history. And yet this was only to be outdone by Clinton’s outsourcing and off-shoring of jobs, and deregulation of the financial sector.