Social Sciences in China Review

No.2, 2018

The Economic Roots of Trumpism（Abstract）

John Komlos

Donald Trump won the election in 2016 largely because enough voters in three states, all in the Rustbelt, switched their vote from Democrat to Republican. Economic dislocations played a crucial role in persuading many voters to vote for an anti-establishment candidate. The sources of the dislocation were the development of a dual economy characterized at one end by low and stagnating wages, increasing debt, downward social mobility, declining relative incomes, and the hopelessness accompanying them while at the other end of the income distribution the economy was simply booming. This was longer than a three-decade process that started with Reaganomics and its tax cuts that privileged the rich and conferred immense wealth, and its concomitant, political power, on them. Reaganomics also accelerated the decline in the power of unions. The process continued under Bill Clinton’s administration along with financial deregulation and hyper-globalization. George Bush continued to pamper the superrich with his tax policies. The process culminated with Barack Obama’s bailing out the superrich and his benign neglect of Mainstreet. Five administrations’ disinterest in the social group Hillary Clinton referred to flippantly as “the deplorables” culminated in the revolt of the masses in favor of an incompetent anti-establishment strongman.