If the candidacy of Donald Trump showed the GOP to be far more fragmented than it thought itself to be, his crossover support revealed a sudden realization among the Democratic faithful that their party had abandoned them. Thomas Edsall summarized the situation in the New York Times: "an insurrection now threatens the future of the Republican Party -- an insurrection of white working class voters who have been among the party’s most loyal supporters since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. These men and women felt that they lacked an effective political voice, until they heard the siren call of Donald J. Trump."
Edsall understood that African Americans had similar, if not greater grounds for disappointment. Could the Democratic party could face a "comparable revolt?"
How have African-American voters been faring over all? Badly. The Democratic debt to black voters is immense, and the party has not paid up.
There is no evidence yet of a political rebellion parallel to the one taking place in the Republican Party, despite the fact that poor black Americans are having a much tougher time than the white working class Republicans flocking to Trump.
One of the ways that revolt has been suppressed is by redirecting the anger of Sanders' activist legions at designated hate objects. The War on Women, shutting down the GOP rallies, are not primarily directed against the Republicans. They are damage control for the Democrats. A ceaseless variety of distractions must be offered because once the relief provided by venting begins to pall, what Elizabeth Kneebone of the Brookings Institution called "the growth and spread of concentrated poverty" may start to be noticed.
As Kyle Smith pointed out in the New York Post, the destruction of the American middle class, both black and white, has been part of a long term shift by the Democratic (and Republican Party) toward a new globalized economic system led by a new credentialed aristocracy. The pauperization of the middle class is happening because and not in spite of Washington's policies.
It wouldn't have been too bad if the new elitist aristocracy had been competent. But Naseem Taleb argues that the global aristocracy has distinguished itself only by a shrill mediocrity. "What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking 'clerks' and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think... and 5) who to vote for."
One of the reasons why Trump has been so destructive to the Republican party is that he divided it not only along the Left-Right political axis, whose shear forces it was prepared to withstand, but also between up and down, creating an earthquake along precisely the fault line that Taleb describes. Taleb notes that in many cases the current aristocrats are know-nothings. "Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren't even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. I have shown that most of what Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types call "rational" or "irrational" comes from misunderstanding of probability theory."
Such misunderstandings were on display in president Obama's $4 billion dollar self-driving car initiative. The Manhattan Institute points out that the president's program could have unanticipated, job-killing results.
About 4 million Americans work as truck drivers. If some large percentage of those jobs went away, this would mean another middle-class occupation had been undermined by technology. Truck drivers do much more than drive. The UPS driver rings your buzzer and hands the package to you, for example. Drivers of soda delivery trucks may also stock the product on the shelves. ...
The locus of power in the automobile industry might also shift from Detroit to Silicon Valley. In the case of music, newspapers and other industries where digitization has already shifted power in that direction, we’ve seen vast industrial disruption...
Keep in mind that one reason President Obama bailed out GM and Chrysler is because more than 1 million jobs in the United States are linked to the auto industry. Yet the tech industry does most of its manufacturing outside the country. Apple employs 700,000 people offshore (including subcontractors), compared with only 43,000 people in the United States. If Silicon Valley wins the driverless car industry, we may see this shift accelerate. Manufacturing jobs are only part of this change ...
The list of potential downstream effects is limitless. It is these second- and third-order upheavals -- politics, policing, etc. -- where the driverless car may create profound societal change far beyond the obvious.
But Obama fails to see the impact of driverless cars, any more than he could see why Putin entered Syria or why he left. The cars program not only emphasizes how the "party of the people" has become the party of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, more dangerously it showcases how feckless the elite is. A nation can withstand a loss of income more than it can endure a loss of faith. And there is precious little in the political system to believe in. With Sanders' crusade folding before the Hillary juggernaut his followers will have no political vehicle of their own. The last prophet will have been struck down.
That leaves them with nothing to do but vent their rage at Trump, Cruz, Romney, etc. They must be kept at it lest they look round them with all the sudden realization of chumps who realize they've been played for fools all these years. Then proceedings may then take on a life of their own.