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I get this feeling that the ascendance of Bern and Drumpf are actually the same phenomenon going through different prisms: a very large cohort of people finally waking up to the fact that they are not in the state of being embarrassed by temporary poverty, but are the leftovers of decades of wealth extraction by the 0.1%, and will not reach the standard of living their parents did, under any circumstance. In Bern's case it is young people who realize following the script has left them with an eduaction for jobs that do not exists and undischargeable debt that they will never recover from, preventing them from ever getting housing they couldn't afford anyway; in Drumpf's case it's older white folks realizing that decades of neo-con trickle-down union-busting globalization lies did actually not lead to their promised prosperity but shoved them to a place where they will now suffer at the same rates as the minorities they could always before safely look down on and feel superior to.
The young ones are ready to share and create collective solutions, so for they go for the centrist* candidate who shares their sense of collective responsibility and collective solutions. The middle-aged ones will still not ever vote blue, but flock to the candidate who started his campagn as a promotion for his reality TV shows and just kept going when he realized his complete and utter lack of credentials, sense, and scruples allowed him to tap into the rage and got him massive amounts of what currently in marketing is called "earned media"**.
But in both cases we're looking at people who see no realistic future of prosperity for themselves. And every time an establishment candidate starts a speech about how America has never been any better than now, like Romney did when denouncing Drumpf this week, these voters know they are being lied to (the America they are in is not better to them than it was to their parents) and tune out to the rest of the message. No matter how well Obama did on the economy, it continues to be extractive, with the "sharing economy" (Taskrabbit, Uber) being a codification of it. People will flock to a man too populist and intellectually weak to even be a proper fascist so they can protest-- that is how fed up they are--or awake.
So working through it by writing, I guess Drumpf voters are what happens when a Marxian awakening takes place in a proletariat with no sense of solidarity for, or trust in, each-other.
*Yes, I am European: Sanders is a centrist.
**Exposure paid for not by an advertising budget, but by sharing and repeating.
The young ones are ready to share and create collective solutions, so for they go for the centrist* candidate who shares their sense of collective responsibility and collective solutions. The middle-aged ones will still not ever vote blue, but flock to the candidate who started his campagn as a promotion for his reality TV shows and just kept going when he realized his complete and utter lack of credentials, sense, and scruples allowed him to tap into the rage and got him massive amounts of what currently in marketing is called "earned media"**.
But in both cases we're looking at people who see no realistic future of prosperity for themselves. And every time an establishment candidate starts a speech about how America has never been any better than now, like Romney did when denouncing Drumpf this week, these voters know they are being lied to (the America they are in is not better to them than it was to their parents) and tune out to the rest of the message. No matter how well Obama did on the economy, it continues to be extractive, with the "sharing economy" (Taskrabbit, Uber) being a codification of it. People will flock to a man too populist and intellectually weak to even be a proper fascist so they can protest-- that is how fed up they are--or awake.
So working through it by writing, I guess Drumpf voters are what happens when a Marxian awakening takes place in a proletariat with no sense of solidarity for, or trust in, each-other.
*Yes, I am European: Sanders is a centrist.
**Exposure paid for not by an advertising budget, but by sharing and repeating.