My Grandfather, the Last Time a Republican Promised Better Days Ahead, and Blue-Collar Workers

I visited my grandmother on Friday for the first time in over a month, and since the election. As I was eating a sandwich and talking to her, she said she wanted me to read something she wrote, and then she proceeded to read it to me. It was a letter about my grandfather, voting, and the impact on his life. At first I found it a bit odd, but then I found it to make perfect sense in light of the results of this election.

My grandfather was a registered independent at the end of his life, a Navy veteran, and chaired his township's planning commission, serving on the body for over 40 years. He almost always voted Democratic though, having grown up in an immigrant household where everyone backed the party of FDR and JFK. The only exception in his Democratic votes for President prior to 1980 were his votes for President Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. As 1980 approached though, things weren't quite going as well for him at work. The boss' kids were now running the business, and many of the benefits were starting to go away. Ronald Reagan promised to bring back American greatness, and to end the sense of a downward spiral in the country. My grandfather liked what he heard. By 1982 though, he was dealing with part-time layoffs, a bleaker future, and tougher times. By 1984, he was anti-Reagan. He felt mislead.

I don't write this to compare Trump to Reagan, but I think there is some level to which the two share common messaging. America did really well from early 1950's until the late 1970's, and the quality of life for working class men was pretty darn good. Unions had secured them raises, benefits, and retirements that allowed them to raise a family in suburbia, and have a sense of pride. That started to die in the 1970's, and the death of it accelerated in the 1980's. The 1990's were a nice decade, but it was more of a pause in the downward spiral than a break. Reagan, at the start of the decline of the working class man, promised that his administration would relieve them of their crushing tax burden, and would give them room to prosper. Trump now promises an even more vague sense of greatness, in which he's going to bring back coal mines and factories, cut taxes to the bone, and somehow balance the budget. It is nothing short of magic, but magic sounds better than reality, especially when the alternative is a pride-less existence, where the good paying jobs are gone, but all the struggles are here to stay.

I am by no means discounting the influence of racism and sexism on the Trump victory- you simply can't divorce them from the outcome. You cannot pretend that they did not contribute to the result, but you can't exclusively blame them either. Here's the simple truth- while the Democratic Party has talked a lot about the plight of a lot of people who absolutely need a government that works for them, the Democratic Party has largely white-washed out any agenda that seems to address blue-collar white guys. Yes, part of that is these voters not voting for us. Part of that is also a push towards identity politics that seem to cast these folks as "privileged," even while they feel forgotten. Are they ignorant on a lot of matters? Yes, they are. They are still people and voters though, and it's hard to see them voting for a party that talked a lot less about apprenticeships and re-training people in the trades, and a lot more about social issues that speak largely to a more affluent voter in the cities and on the coasts.

Reagans' 1980s were not kind to my grandfather's hometown of Phillipsburg, an industrial place that saw many of it's top employers leave. His old workplace, Keystone Packaging, looks largely closed at this point, and definitely isn't employing a bunch of blue-collar workers today. Reagan did leave office fairly well-liked though, in no small part because he spoke directly to these blue-collar workers and convinced them that he could solve their problems. Donald Trump has gone a step further, blaming the "others" for their problems, and saying that he alone can solve these issues. Democrats would be wise to not discount the power in that message moving forward.

My guess is that Donald Trump will actually try to govern more in the tradition of pre-JFK Democrats than actually as a full-blown Reagan, or worse yet, a Hitler. He will infuse populist economics in his message, while sprinkling in some racism, sexism, and classism that his base craves. That is how he ran, and it worked well for him. He'll scapegoat groups, while sometimes not acting on his wild-eyed promises, and use that to cover up the simple truth of the matter here- Donald Trump isn't bringing back those factories, he's not bringing back those coal mines, and he's not ending global trade. Nobody is. If he actually succeeded, we'd have a Depression economically, and we'd go backwards a century. For that reason, I doubt he'll actually succeed in enacting his campaign promises, but he'll keep that rhetoric up to mask the fact that he is actually governing like any mainstream Republican of the last quarter-century would- tax cuts for the wealthy, de-regulation for corporations, and some hand-outs for supportive groups of the party. Donald Trump won't actually be a change agent at all, he'll just be a fraud that manages to enrage people on all political sides.

My grandfather was a working class boy from Phillipsburg, who served his country, and then was able to move out to the township and have a decent life. He, like many blue-collar men of today, fell for a man who promised to make American life great again, if we'd just follow him. It took him a lot less time than most to realize he had been had. Unfortunately, it's happened again in America. We can only hope this time that people come to their senses quicker.