After the midterms, Republicans and Democrats must tackle the true cause of American anger – automation
- Gwynne Dyer says Trump’s targeting of offshore manufacturing ignores the fact more jobs were and will continue to be lost to automation
- While Democrats suspect what the root of the problem is, they seem unsure how to deal with it
The Democratic Party is multicultural, feminist (84 of the 100 women elected to the new House of Representatives are Democrats), and even socialist. Only one-third of the Democrats in the new Congress will be white men – and many of the Democrats in the House of Representatives can be classed as Democratic Socialists.
Watch: US midterm elections – the key takeaways
But Trump didn’t lose all that badly, either. The Republicans’ losses were within the normal range for a governing party in midterm elections, so the political civil war goes on unabated.
The divisions will continue and even deepen because neither of the major American parties understands what is making Americans so angry and unhappy. Donald Trump knows that it is fundamentally about jobs, but he is barking up the wrong tree when he blames it on “offshoring” and free trade, and promises to make other countries give the jobs back.
Many Democrats suspect what the real problem is, but they won’t discuss it openly because they have no idea how to deal with it. What is really destroying American jobs is automation.
It’s destroying jobs in other developed countries too, with similar political consequences. The “leave” side won the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom because of strong support in the post-industrial wastelands of northern and central England.
But the process is farthest advanced in the US, which has lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs in the past 25 years, 5.6 million of them since 2000. Only 2 million of those jobs were lost because the factories were offshored to Mexico or China, and that happened mostly in the 1990s. The rest were simply abolished by automation.
The rust belt went first, because assembly-line manufacturing is the easiest thing in the world to automate. The retail jobs are going now, because of Amazon and its ilk. The next big chunk to disappear will be the 4.5 million driving jobs in the US, lost to self-driving vehicles.
The official US unemployment rate of 3.7 per cent is a fantasy. The proportion of American men of prime working age (25 to 54) who are actually not working, according to Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, is 17.5 per cent. Or at least that’s what it was when he did his big study two years ago.
Maybe the allegedly booming economy of the past couple of years has brought that number down a bit, but it’s a safe bet that it’s still around 14 to 15 per cent. This is a rate of unemployment last seen in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Why isn’t there blood on the streets? There certainly was in the 1930s.
The Great Depression led to the rise of populism, the triumph of fascism and the catastrophe of the second world war, so almost all developed Western countries created welfare states in the 1950s and 1960s to avoid going down that road again. The economy might tank again, but at least people would not be so desperate and so vulnerable to populist appeals.
It kind of worked: there is plenty of anger among the unemployed and the underemployed, but they do not turn to violence. They do vote, however, and their votes are driven by anger.
Until the major parties can acknowledge that it is the computers that are killing the jobs, and that it probably can’t be stopped, the anger will continue to grow. You can’t begin to fix the problem until you understand it.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy (and Work)