"from the year 2ooo, upward mobility reversed itself"

[phantom power]

If you’re too busy the TL R of those two developments are the interrelated facts that from the year 2ooo, upward mobility reversed itself, with more people falling into the middle class and poverty and fewer making it up the ladder — and the impact of China and its increasing integration into a world-wide free-trade regimen. Edsall’s reporting on the China development — with its accompanying misreading by free-trade elites — is particularly sharp.

Add to that, as Edsall does, the TARP bailout after the elite-engineered collapse of 2007-8 and the Citizens United decision and you have specific and plausible reasons for Republican working class voters (and everyone else, of course) to see their chosen political leaders as shills and swindlers:

By opening the door to the creation of SuperPACs and giving Wall Street and other major financial sectors new ways to buy political outcomes, the courts gave the impression, to say the least, that they favored establishment interests over those of the less well off.

Edsall’s conclusion?

The tragedy of the 2016 campaign is that Trump has mobilized a constituency with legitimate grievances on a fool’s errand.

The crux for this year is exactly that: Lots of Americans have been screwed — systematically, with comprehensive effect — for decades. The material losses they – we — have suffered are real. The responses Trump offers, such as they are, may be hopelessly at odds with any actual redress of those wrongs. But any campaign (are you listening, Hillary?) that ignores the fact that two generations of Americans now have seen the basic expectations of life reversed is going to have hard time winning, just by pointing out that Trump’s bloviating won’t help either.

https://www.balloon-juice.com/2016/03/02/todays-smart-read/

[The2ndWheel]

1. "the basic expectations of life"

Upward mobility is far from a real expectation of life. I doubt if such a thing could actually exist anyway. It's an abstract idea that exists only in the human mind, but that's different than an actual basic expectation of life. Even then, there's no guarantee of upward mobility, if you hope for it, work for it, or whatever.

[hedda_foil]

2. The comments here are really good.

Like this one.

NR says:
March 2, 2016 at 2:11 pm

Good article. EJ Dionne has said basically the same thing.

Of course, Hillary has no plan to address any of these problems. And her link to Wall Street is something that Trump is going to hammer her on every day of the campaign. Granted Trump has his own problems. But he is going to hit her on her Wall Street ties, and Hillary has no defense. She, and most of her supporters, are utterly clueless about the political liability that those ties create.

It doesn’t help matters that Hillary and her people think that the 90s were great and then the Republicans got into power and screwed everything up. The reality is that neoliberal economics has been a disaster for a huge swath of the country, masked only by stock bubbles. The system is broken. This right here addresses it pretty well:

The widespread sense that all the elites in Washington and New York conspired to bail out the miscreants who caused the disaster and then gave them bonuses, while the rest of us lost our houses or saw their value, the biggest and often only asset of Americans, plummet, lost our jobs or saw them frozen and stagnant, and then saw gaping inequality grow even more, is just palpable.

Trump is obviously not the answer, but people are turning to him because they don’t feel they have another option.