Trump is the perfect court jester for the time, a clown sent into the three ring circus to cheer society’s forlorn and make them forget, at least temporarily, the hopelessness and banality of their existence. He could not have won in the past, and will not win in the future, but dumb luck and serendipity---plus the Democrat’s foolhardiness in selecting their most polarizing candidate ever---allowed him to seize his brief moment in time and exploit it.
There is one single core factor at the heart of everything that ails global society at this time. Trump either doesn’t know it, or would never admit it. Every other problem is merely a symptom of that core factor. There is an intractable problem facing humanity that will alter the course of human history in ways never seen before, and its impact will be greater---albeit in a negative way---than the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, or the discovery of the uses for crude oil. Those three things were life positive and population positive; the current key factor is the exact opposite.
Labor has no pricing power. That’s it. Everything---from the debt bubble to terrorism to racial unrest to the cartoon character called Trump---can all be traced back to that one factor. Labor has no pricing power. Today it is largely restricted to unskilled labor, but the technology Borg is chomping its way up the skill chain, taking no prisoners.
Recency bias is real and can be deceptive, but it is probably fair to say that the relentless and inexorable trends that now confront the world truly are unprecedented. Entire swathes of humanity, both in the developing and developed world, are redundant. Unnecessary. Unable to actually earn the means to sustain themselves. These people are confused. They’re desperate. They’re angry. Like most humans incapable of accepting personal responsibility and blame, they look for something or someone to blame for their own failings, inadequacies, or simple Darwinian unfitness.
Trump, the man in the boat who landed on the shores of Serendipity, is either clever enough to address the fears, anger and confusion of the forlorn by feeding them whatever comforting delusions they seek, or else he is simply a lucky fool in the right place at the right time.
How desperate for delusion, and how easily fooled his sycophants are, is best illustrated by the new buzzterm ‘Fake News’. Trump throws out the epithet without offering examples, while he himself has a near total monopoly of the Fake News airwaves. In his first bizarre presser, Trump dropped no less than 17 demonstrably provable falsehoods. In his post-campaign campaign rally on 18 February, Trump noted a completely fictitious ‘last night in Sweden’ event. His minions didn’t call him on it. They need to believe everything he says, because they dare not even consider that his job promises are equally unrealistic. Thus, they never challenge any of his or his team’s utterances, no matter how bizarre. His battle-scarred mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway, the seemingly recently deceased woman who coined the term ‘Alternative Facts’, invented the Bowling Green Massacre. Trumpers bought it. Trump could probably travel to Kentucky on the made-up anniversary of that ‘massacre’ and lay a ceremonial wreath on the Tomb of the Unreal Victims, and his minions would shed tears and lower the Confederate flags on their pick-up trucks to half-staff.
This problem of redundant labor is not new, but the trend has accelerated recently. A number of stopgap measures were implemented along the way to try to address it, even if the problem itself was not fully understood or even acknowledged.
One solution was to manufacture purchasing power where it no longer exists naturally. Global competition led to outsourcing, which destroyed the purchasing power of unskilled labor in the developed world. Even foreign manufacturing facilities, however, still needed to sell their output. The developed world answered by making credit more readily available. People who couldn’t earn real purchasing power were handed it in the form of loans. Initially the credit came from the banks. They loaned against physical assets, such as homes, essentially creating a third household income.
All was well and good provided 1) assets prices did not fall, and 2) no more labor obviation took place in the developed world. As everyone now knows, neither held steady. Of course they were inter-related anyway, so the fall of one guaranteed the fall of the other.
Responsibility for the next stop gap measure fell on government, in the form of new Federal borrowings to create make-work, and via money printing and asset purchases by Central Banks. Those policies, initiated during the Obama years, bought some time. They did not, however, and could not, do anything to halt the inexorable trend of obviated labor. Labor is being decimated by a kind of General Sherman’s march to the sea. Next to nothing is going to survive.
A tired, over worn, but nonetheless useful analogy is the Titanic. Unskilled labor are those working below the water line, in the boiler rooms, drowning as water flows into the ship’s hold. They have no chance of survival. Many died seconds after the iceberg strike. The elite---people such as Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or Ray Dalio---were in First Class and had easy access to the lifeboats. Some may have ‘dressed as women’ and survived unfairly (is feeding Neo Narcissism worthy of being one of the richest people on Earth?), but survive they did. Others remain on deck, some even running to the stern, but that only buys them a few additional minutes of life. Their modern embodiment might be people such as computer code writers, soon to be replaced by computers who write better code faster. Still others are like the band: they know they’re going to die, but they still play Londonderry Air or Danny Boy. Maybe these are like “Preppers”.
Trump’s primary demo are the ones below deck. They are dead for sure, but in their last moments are trying to make deals with their God. He is not listening. Creating a Universe in ‘seven days’ is a piece of cake compared to finding a use for redundant labor in an increasingly technological world.
Enter Trump, less a god than the serpent in the Garden of Eden, a malevolent miscreant convincing people that he can lead them to a better and faster kind of salvation. He need not be honest nor moral, neither of which he is. All he needs to do is feed the fears and hopes of his desperate followers.
“It’s the immigrants!” “It’s Moslems!” “It’s the swamp!” Trump hands them excuses for their failures.
Failure, sadly, tends to breed hatred. It always has, and always will. The unscrupulous will forever try to take advantage of that human frailty. Hitler was a master at it. He won over a sizable majority of the German people, leading them into the Holocaust as well as the most damaging conflagration in all of history.
Trump has only captured about 40% of Americans, which pretty much matches the percent of labor already obviated. He is using the same tactics as Hitler: manufacturing enemies---immigrants and foreigners, the media, the judiciary, the intelligence community---and fomenting hatred. In Trumpistan only they stand in the way of America’s revitalization. Trump is throwing out endless absurdities, hyperbole, sophistry, and outright lies---and then has the temerity to call the media the source of Fake News. Trump is attacking the very Constitution he swore to uphold, yet his sycophants are so addled and confused they suck it up as nectar from the gods. They might know the 2nd Amendment, but they would be wise to be as adamant about the 1st one, too. Trump seems to think the press should be his microphone, aiding his cause, rather than something as free of government influence as the Founding Fathers---people infinitely smarter than Trump---intended it to be.
All of that was good enough to get him elected. It is good enough to keep his approval ratings near 35-40% for the time being, even while his disapproval rating skyrockets.
It will not last. It cannot last. The problems---the core problem as well as the problems created via stopgap solutions---are not going to go away. Jobs---other than a precious few that have a temporary stay of execution---are never coming back to the US. They might be held for a time in China or Bangladesh, but that is merely a way station on the road to total oblivion.
While today’s situation is unprecedented, there are a few historical parallels. Labor has lost its pricing power a few times in the past, but a ‘man-made’ solution or an Act of God intervened. Man’s solution tends to be war, God’s solution is epidemic. Neither is pretty.
Serfdom did not disappear after the Dark Ages or Medieval times because humans suddenly became more moral. It died because along came the Plague, and upwards of thirty percent of Europe was wiped out. Labor became a needed and valuable commodity again. Labor could demand to be paid a living wage.
Something similar, albeit less destructive, happened in the mid 18th Century with Cyrus McCormick’s invention of the combine. That machine could do in one day what it previously had taken fifty men two weeks to affect. Most labor had no choice but to leave the farm. Luckily, labor could walk into the factories that represented the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution enveloping the world nowadays is not human labor intensive. Unlike the 18th Century, in the 21st Century there is no place to go. No place. Also, if plague comes again, machines are immune. Production will only slow if demand dies, not labor.
The world is quickly reaching the point where there are no longer any other stopgap measures to ameliorate the effects and bide humanity over until a solution presents itself. Debt has reached its practical limit, if it hasn’t already gone well past that. Debtors are having trouble repaying at historically low rates. A rise in rates, if it were to occur, would decimate the finances of every government on Earth, kill asset markets, or kill the collateral that ostensibly stands behind borrowings.
There is no new industry to absorb obviated workers. There is no re-education that will provide skills that society needs, because it doesn’t need any. All more ‘education’ will do is add to the debt bubble. The remaining essential portions of society, who can command fair payment, will be forced to carry an ever-increasing number of the unnecessary. The unnecessary, by and large, are those who were smitten by Trump’s siren song, but like ships attracted by the mythical Sirens, the Trumpers will be smashed on the rocky coast of reality.
Similarly, the solutions to the symptoms (not the cause) proposed by the ‘real money’ crowd are equally spurious. Shutting the Fed, banning fractional reserve, or even reinstituting the gold standard isn’t going to bring back the jobs of unskilled labor nor halt the march of technological progress. In fact, the only reason many unskilled workers are even able to own a home now is because banks manage their deposit base using the same methodology as the insurance industry uses to assess risk. That is all fractional reserve is: an actuarial approach to funding. A bank loan is just as real as the insurance policy on a house in California or in Florida’s Hurricane Alley.
The walking cartoon character called Trump isn’t smart enough to know any of that. He is poorly read, intellectually lazy, and prone to a kind of childish impulsiveness that can only be damaging. His ‘instincts’ really aren’t very good, though he is the first to claim otherwise. If he has cornered the market in anything, it is hyperbole and superlatives. All things Trump are ‘the greatest’, ‘the best’, and ‘unbelievable’. Everything non-Trump is ‘a disaster’, ‘a disgrace’, and ‘#sad’.
Trump’s wealth comes not from any great skill, but from being in the right place at the right time. Trump engaged in New York City real estate at the same time the responsibility for creating stopgap measures for labor obviation fell to the banks and financial community. Since NYC was the US’s, and maybe the world’s epicenter of banking, real estate rose. Trump benefited both from the asset rise and from free money. Every other Trump venture has been a failure, usually resulting in bankruptcy and lawsuits. Casinos, an airline, a university, a football team, meat, vodka and designer water---were all Trump failures. He’s had far more business failures than failed marriages, in fact, despite the fact he has almost been a commuter down the aisle.
His minions cannot see Trump for what he is, nor can they see him for what he can never be, which is effective, rational, sane, and mentally stable. If Trump says ‘hate’, they hate. If Trump promises a chicken in every pot, they believe him and their mouths water. If Trump calls reality “fake” and fantasy “real”, they are on board. That is the madness of crowds, especially desperate ones. He feeds them and they feed off each other. They build echo chambers into which they immerse themselves.
The danger of Trumpism is that he will create more problems than the country and the world already have. While there may be no solution to what ails humanity---other than the horrific ones history shows us arise regardless of anyone trying to stop them---Trump can and will exacerbate the problems because of his stupidity, his impulsiveness, his fear-mongering, his alienation of allies both domestic and international, his hate speech, and his overall mental instability. He will make things worse than they have to be, if he stays in office much longer.
It would be foolish to project his current level of support into any near or long term future. It has an expiration date. His schtick will wear thin, especially when reality intervenes and his support base begins to understand Trump cannot deliver on his mostly empty promises. They will see their Emperor has no clothes, (and anyone looking at his physique shudders to think what it would look like naked; no wonder Melania lives in New York).
If Trump remains in power at that point, the real danger begins. Trump’s characteristic kneejerk reaction is to thrust blame on to others. If he sees his support eroding, he will try to foment even more hatred. Today it is Moslems and Mexicans (and sadly, Indian engineers in Kansas), but it is likely Trump will have to widen his universe of ‘bad hombres’. Maybe the next people of scorn will be blacks. Maybe Asians. Certainly---given Trump’s public record of statements---it will be people who do not look like Trump or 99% of his supporters. Trump even has his Nazi doppelgangers in place in the form of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the latter of whom looks uncannily---and scarily---like Heinrich Himmler. It is inevitable Trump will do this, because he is incapable of behaving in any other manner. He also knows it will be effective in maintaining a good portion of his base for as long as possible.
The future is already going to produce challenges the likes of which humanity has never before faced. Real leadership is required---demanded, in fact---but none seems to exist. Certainly it does not exist in the form of Trump. As difficult as things might become, Trump can only make it worse. The sooner the country, and the world, are rid of him, the better it will be, even if 'better' is a relative term.