Goosefoot — American “progressives” know absolutely nothing about economics beyond the mantra “supply and demand.”
They don’t know how money is created, they don’t understand the role of banks in that, they don’t understand the difference between the reported unemployment rate (U-3) and the actual unemployment rate (U-6) — the difference being that reported unemployment rate doesn’t include workers who’ve been unemployed longer than 6 months, so called “discouraged” workers — they don’t understand what “trade deficit” means, they don’t understand why a govt. budget is not like a household budget —
And so they idiotically praise both Clinton and Obama for cutting the governmental budget at a time when the trade deficit increased. This is a basic accounting issue they don’t even understand.
All they have is identity politics.
And a conviction, against every statistical measure EXCEPT the stock market, that Obama made things better economically for everyone and therefore the fact that people in the Rust Belt are hurting can only point to their own personal failings (like not learning to code and moving to one of the coasts.)
The complete capture of ”progressive” politics by postmodernism in academia is utterly responsible for this.
One would think that the Great Financial Crisis would have spurred so-called “progressives” to consider that understanding economics and the financial system might be important — but no.
And since they don’t understand any of that, contrary to every statistical measure except the stock market, they believe that Obama improved things for all American workers. The corollary to this belief is that those who’ve fallen behind — those who are dying of what economists Case & Deacon called “deaths of despair — are suffering due to their own personal failings.
And since any policy they don’t like they call racist (such as protectionism) they also decide that those who advocate for such policies as alternatives to the harm they’re suffering from current neoliberal economics are also racist. Being racist, they deserve those deaths of despair.
It’s horrific thinking, really. I run into it all the time in the big “liberal” cities in the US. It’s also completely self-defeating, electorally speaking. Essentially, they write off the 70% of Americans who don’t have college degrees.
In the wake of the Trump victory, what I heard most often wasn’t anything like: well, we need to do a better job campaigning in Red states. Instead it was: the Blue states need to leave the Union and let the voters in the Red states rot.