 After the 2016 election, I went digging for the best analyses I could find of why Trump won. I'm, uh, Eileen Left and was as surprised as anybody at Hillary's loss of the election, although I sort of suspected there might be a Brexit in the offing. But really, I think a lot of my reasoning changed afterward. And it changed because I found these pieces and also did some thinking of myself. So let's dive into some of the reasons that I found. I just published before this 11 minute video about how Trump hijacked absolutely everybody. He hijacked the media, the grand old party, fringe elements and liberals, and he created this virtuous circle, although I hate to say it that way, that basically gave him free media and had him own the media cycle pretty much almost every day of the campaign. It was quite amazing. I managed to hijack absolutely everybody. That seemed to me to be pretty central. Then there's a lovely piece in the Atlantic about how, and this phrase is a lovely flip phrase. The media took Trump literally, but not seriously. But his followers took him seriously just not literally. So the media was busy saying, oh my God, oh my God, he said this horrible thing, but he's not really a viable candidate. Look at what a clown he is. His followers were like, hey, this dude is saying something that's ringing my bell, and then he's saying all this other weird stuff, but it's sort of metaphoric. I mean, he wants to build a wall with Mexico. I'm pretty sure he doesn't mean there's going to be like a 30-foot wall with barbed wire. I mean, he's going to try to pay attention to these laws, for example. So that's another, I think that was another really important thing that played into the dynamics here. Then a really key issue on the lower left here. Trump pride-loose the Rust Belt. The Democrats managed to ignore the Rust Belt. In fact, there are some very interesting articles about what happened to the white working class and also the origins of neoliberalism. So Kathy Kramer from University of Wisconsin went all around Wisconsin for several years interviewing people, just sitting down and talking with them. And what she uncovered, she called the politics of resentment, that government, and in this case they meant Wisconsin government, and this is sort of what led to the rise of Scott Walker, and that's part of what she was examining. But government just takes money from us and the money never makes it back to us. We don't get any benefit from it. And there are no jobs here. There's not much going on. On the left there, one of the video I've got embedded here is from the Anywhere but Washington series that The Guardian ran that Paul Lewis was shooting. He did eight videos across the country where you really get a sense of what was happening in the Rust Belt and other sorts of places. But also neoliberalism ate the Democratic Party. So the Democrats and Republicans are usually at each other's throats around social issues, things like abortion and welfare and whatnot. But neoliberalism, this whole idea that we should have lower trade barriers and allow corporations to grow really big and not worry so much about antitrust, kind of lower those barriers, all those kinds of things took over the Democratic Party and all of a sudden both parties were busy pushing globalization, even though they were deadlocked on a whole bunch of other sorts of things. This really opened the floodgates for jobs to leave the country. And neither party was doing very much for the people who lost their jobs. It's not like when you're replaced and somebody sends your job overseas, they don't send you an email that says congratulations. All you have to do now is take care of the beets and the goats and you'll be fine. No, no, no, you're on the street and who knows what's going to happen to you. If you're in a small town and that company was the large employer in town, your town is devastated. So that was happening all over the place. And the Democrats in particular were not paying attention. Trump was ringing that bell every chance he got, pretty much every speech. This is a chart of the swing in votes from previous election, from the previous presidential election, and clearly the rust belt in the middle of Industrial America swung. Hillary's firewall broke. These were states that traditionally went Democratic and boom, they swung the wrong way. And in some cases, not by that much, but this was a pretty big shift. So Hillary I'm now convinced was entirely the wrong candidate. And I wanted as much as anybody to vote for and see elected the first woman president of the United States. As Justin Trudeau said, why? Because 2016, right? We've gotten far enough. Hillary was the wrong candidate for this particular election. Michael Moore in this article, where he also talks about the rust belt, also talks about how she was an example of the establishment, too cozy with Wall Street, basically an insider. She had exactly all the traits that Trump was running against. She was the perfect foil for Trump. And she had enough scandals in her background, even though I am on the side that these weren't any of them really big scandals, because, you know, anyway, I won't go down that rat hole. But in the middle of puzzling on this and why Hillary was the wrong candidate, I suddenly had a big aha, which I call that Hillary had me put some important thoughts on hold. And what I mean by this is the relationship economy thesis basically says that we've been designing all of our institutions from mistrust of the average individual, that we lost faith somehow. And we started building all of our institutions like education and elections and all that for efficiency and scale. And we snipped away things like community and meaning and purpose and connectedness and all the interdependencies that held our society together. And it dawned on me that my thesis says we need to redesign everything. We need massive change because our institutions are broken. Let's just look at our political institutions and our media institutions from all the videos here. And so I didn't realize until Hillary lost that I had set aside those wishes and I was just going to vote for Hillary anyway, because she was going to be kind of a good caretaker and she wouldn't be as reckless and crazy and misogynistic as Donald Trump. But I had no illusions that she was going to change much, if anything. In fact, I'm not a fan of Bill Clinton's administration. I think he signed a lot of bills that I think he regrets having signed and that did not do us any good. I love Obama personally and I think he stepped into the most insanely crazy situation and steadied it. But he also missed a lot of things and didn't solve some of these problems. So it dawned on me that Hillary really caused me to put things on hold and that people really wanted real change. The Brexit vote, Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party movement, the Arab Spring in other countries are no jobs recovery under employment everywhere. People wanted real change and Grant McCracken wrote this article that Trump is a fire ship, meaning mostly in the age of sale, you would light a ship on fire and then push it into your enemies so that they would light on fire because ships were made of wood and pitch and tar and cloth and they were really nice fire hazards. Trump was a fire ship. He was something that people backing him could push into the system and hope to explode the system. And immigration was the fuse. But I don't have immigration here as a big issue. I think that the rust belt was bigger than immigration. Immigration was bait in a sense of the hijacking that I talked about in the previous video. Then finally, and this is partly navigating the shoals here, liberals were busy fighting for transgender access to bathrooms and the white working class was like, shit, nobody gives a damn about us. And there's a whole bunch of sort of political correctness topics, trigger warnings, microaggressions, multiple gender identity choices, safe spaces, notions of white privilege, all of which I agree with. I think, yes, totally, get it, got it. The history around the reasons for political correctness is awful. Respect, dignity and equality are completely justified and needed. And the long arc of justice in fact bends this way. But there had been a ton of victories on this front. And the conversation was so happily going down this path that really important things that were happening under cover in the country were not being attended to. And that boil basically burst open. So part of the problem here, and I don't know that I'll be able to explain this properly, is that we pass laws when discourse fails. When we can no longer talk to each other, we go and it's like, all right, we're just going to pass a law or a rule or some thing we could point to that will force you to behave differently. And that's what started happening with political correctness on campuses, for example, and in other places. This is all a result of the consumerization of our entire lives. When you're in relationship, you can have discourse and you can sort things out and you can get to know each other and not fear each other. When all of that gets thrown away and when discourse is broken, that's when we start passing laws. And when you suddenly pass all these things as laws, then the people on the other side of the fence think that they're being muzzled, that their freedom of expression has gone away, and so on and so forth. And there's certainly cases of people going overboard with political correctness in different ways. So this causes a whole series of imbalances that would be much better off dealt with conversation. So these are the best of the analyses I've been able to find about Trump's victory. You can look back at my first video to see how we consumerized everything because I think that plays a really big role here as well. My name is Jerry McCalsky. I'm not a historian or a political theorist. All these points I've put in the first introductory video. So thank you very much for listening to this one and come back. There's more.