As a politics writer, I often get texts from friends asking me to explain this or that political or social issue. On Election Night, I got about 10 of these, all of which more or less read, “Dude, WTF is happening?!?!”
But, of course, it’s impossible to pen a simple explanation for something like Trump. Recently, I was thinking about satirist Karl Sharro’s attempt to write a “simple” one-sentence explanation for what created ISIL. His 181-word end product was a serious explanation masked in a joke — namely, that something as complicated as ISIL’s rise could be confined to one sentence, despite the attempts by many a clickbaity headline — e.g., “The One-Sentence Explanation for What Caused ISIL,” “The Simple Explanation for Brexit,” or “The Simple Reason Why Jack Had to Die in Titanic,” (an actual Cosmo article).
So after some research and consultation, I came up with this one-sentence explanation of Trump’s win.
High wages in the postwar United States, created by the victories of a strong labor movement and the potential for new transportation and robotics technology led to American corporations moving manufacturing overseas or automating existing jobs to save money, which eviscerated industrial and white working-class regional economies, while the hegemony of free-market economic policies as a result of corporations endowing universities, foundations and right-wing think tanks with economists who pushed for neoliberal agendas such that those economic ideas became normalized within the establishment and the electoral success of Republican politicians pushed the Democratic Party further right on economic issues, meaning that they abandoned the working class in the United States, which meant that poor and disenfranchised white Americans had no party that adequately understood and represented their struggles while the economic agendas pushed by either party in power steadily shrank the social safety net and opportunities available to the American working class such that far-right media outlets, funded by billionaires who were able to offer alternative narratives targeted at whites for their dire economic situation that scapegoated immigrants, minorities, federal-government employees and the poor for economic problems caused by free-market and deregulatory policies while sophistically presenting a narrative of American identity-politics-based movements as exclusive and exemplifying animus toward whites such that a populist demagogue outsider who echoed these scapegoats and had built a brand of himself as epitomizing hegemonic capitalist notions of “success” was able to capture large swaths of American voters and, with help from Republican PR apparatuses that had successfully branded his opponent as corrupt and castigated her as ingrained in a liberal establishment whose policies failed to produce tangible economic change in the lives of working people such that her base support was shakier than expected, while nearly all registered Republican voters ultimately voted for the GOP candidate, was enough to tip the scales and win the electoral vote for Donald Trump.
I asked Joseph Schwartz, a political science professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, what he thought of this explanation. He advised that he would emphasize how tenuous Trump’s victory was. “You’re looking at a marginal change in the presidential vote from 2012 to 2016,” he said. “[In 2016] all Republicans came home to Trump — that was somewhat of a surprise. He got 90%-plus of registered Republican voters. Hillary got only the low 80s of registered Democrats. And the race was decided by 97,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.”
“Today 300,000 auto workers make 17 million cars in the US, which is what 1.7 million made in 1970,” Schwartz noted.
Schwartz stressed the astonishing contraction of the manufacturing sector, which was large back in the days when America was (ostensibly) great. “Today 300,000 auto workers make 17 million cars in the US, which is what 1.7 million made in 1970,” he noted.
Julian Gottlieb, a visiting assistant professor in the political science department at the University of Oregon, was coy about the one-sentence idea. “There is no ‘panoptic’ view of Trump’s victory,” Gottlieb wrote in an email. “The way I see it, many small but consequential factors explain [Clinton’s] loss…I can boil it down to what I think are the most salient reasons:
Trump won because he had an easily digestible public narrative about corrupt government bureaucrat dietitians regulating away the Rust Belt’s double bacon cheeseburgers (dirty energy / manufacturing jobs); the hubristic, obstinate idiocy of the other GOP presidential candidates, who failed to leave the primary race in time to rally around a viable alternative nominee; Hillary Clinton’s poor electoral-college arithmetic and her inability to resuscitate Obama’s “hope and change” message with analytics, focus groups, A/B testing, a rapid-response army and a Pantsuit Nation that slowly drowned in a sea of raging populist waves crashing against her Wall Street–sponsored, Clinton Global Initiative–financed yacht in the Hamptons.
At 103 words, Gottlieb’s answer is practically a haiku.
