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The disenfranchised voter

Last week I wrote about Donald Trump's appeal to a certain demographic of voters. I said that polls have shown that labour voters have looked to Trump to bring back the America of yesteryear with high paying, low skilled jobs.
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Last week I wrote about Donald Trump's appeal to a certain demographic of voters. I said that polls have shown that labour voters have looked to Trump to bring back the America of yesteryear with high paying, low skilled jobs.

Recently The Citizen published an excellent article by Dr. Trevor Handcock entitled: "Poor, white, angry and unhealthy" which described this demographic of voters in accurate detail. Handcock ended the article by saying that "a less comprehensive social safety net" exists in the United States to mitigate the impacts for workers disenfranchised by globalization.

What is curious of course is that the American political culture is driven by a different set of values than other countries like many in Europe and in Canada: a set of values that does not venerate the "social safety net."

I said last week that we see the same types of voters who vote for Trump, those disenfranchised in the 21st century economy, are also voting for Bernie Sanders.

So what makes the appeal of these two politicians cross the political spectrum? Sanders is a social democrat and Trump is a self-proclaimed "conservative" although many fear that his rhetoric is stirring a darker kind of revolution. The answer to the question of how these two men can be appealing to the same group is that they are both focused on the same "enemy" that is to say the global market forces that have disenfranchised workers.

However, they present two very different ideas about how the state can mitigate the challenges of disenfranchisement.

As I suggested last week, the world's economy rotates on a different axes than it did after the Second World War. Even as the economy recovers, the same jobs in the manufacturing sector are not going to return. Trump's approach is simply to say that his negotiating skills will allow him to recover American jobs.

Sanders has the same message: stem the tide of free trade. An article by David A. Graham in The Atlantic on Mar. 9 entitled, "Michigan Says it wants a Revolution" said that: "the win (in Michigan) offers Sanders new momentum, along with ... evidence that his message of fighting for blue-collar workers and opposing free-trade deals can resonate - and with Ohio and Illinois coming up on the primary calendar on Mar. 15, he'll soon have the opportunity to employ that message again."

Now Sanders did not win Ohio or Illinois but he came very close. In Illinois the vote split was 50.5 for Clinton to Sanders 48.7 and in Ohio Clinton received 56 per cent and Sanders 42.7 per cent. So his message is being heard.

But again what is so very interesting is that polls show that Sanders and Trump supporters come from the same demographic. A Mar. 31 article by Amber Jamieson called "The Bernie Sanders Voters who would choose Trump over Clinton" said: "This week the Guardian sought out Sanders fans who are contemplating switching their allegiance to Trump if Hillary Clinton secures the Democratic nomination. Almost 700 people replied to the call-out, and some 500 of them said they were thinking the unthinkable: a Sanders-Trump switch.

"They explained their unconventional position by expressing a variety of passionately held views on their shared commitment for protecting workers and against new wars, on their zeal for an alternative to the establishment, and on their desire to support anyone but Hillary Clinton."

Now clearly the solutions that Sanders and Trump would draw upon would be very different. Sanders is looking to the state to create a context in which workers can become more resilient in a globalizing economy creating, if you will, the "comprehensive social safety net" that Handcock points to in his article.

But there is an enormous obstacle to the development of that safety net. Sanders' "Achilles heel," as some analysts call it, is in his tendency to appear to rebuke capitalism as the enemy instead of saying that the spoils of capitalism can be shared through strong social programs, not just wealth redistribution.

The American Dream is built on a belief in the strength of each individual to achieve their economic goals and a "comprehensive social safety net" clashes with the core value of individualism.