patrick.net

The tension between long-term and short-term economic interests has become a favorite topic in policy circles in recent years, but the election of Donald Trump, in 2016, brought the implications into clearer focus. Much of Trump’s base is made up of white, rural voters; many of them have seen jobs disappear from their communities, while wages have stagnated for those still working. In the midterm elections, Democrats won at least thirty-eight additional seats in the House of Representatives (as of Wednesday), gaining a majority, but Republicans performed better than many people expected; high-school-educated voters came out, once again, strongly in favor of the party of Trump. According to Shaich, the resentment that these voters feel is a direct result of the quick-profits-over-all ethos that dominates economic thinking. “When we live in a world where we view value creation as the end, and not as a by-product, which is what short-term thinking lends itself to, we end up doing great damage to every other constituency, and that’s what ultimately drives back to the kind of ‘let’s rip down the establishment’ nihilism that in my view is at the core of Trumpism,” he said. “Trump is, ‘Hey, this isn’t serving me. I’ve been sitting here in Michigan and Wisconsin and Ohio, I thought I’d have a middle-class life if I went to work, and my kids can’t pay their student debt. I lost my manufacturing job and I’m making twelve dollars an hour in a service job. And these guys are closing every plant and squeezing every nickel out of the thing, and Wall Street gets rich. And I’m still living a tough life.’ ” He added, “Trump is a human hand grenade to blow up a society that isn’t working for big swatches of America.”