From Ross Perot to Donald Trump: Chronical of a Shipwreck Foretold

Bordered by the waters of the Illinois River, the city of Peoria, headquarters for Caterpillar, has for decades been America’s barometer. “Will it play in Peoria?” asked political communications advisors before launching their new “products” on the American market.

Today, the region of Peoria is no longer mainstream America in a nutshell. Although far from being an economic desert, it rests within the Rust Belt, land of manufacturing industries hit with full force by the technological switchover and by globalization. In November, certain states in this region (Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan) will be “for the taking” and it is in these swing states, pivots of the electoral campaign, that these experts are trying to predict the impact of the Trump phenomenon.

Since the 1980s, since the Reagan years marked by deregulation and free trade, tens of millions of Americans have prospered in those sectors that lead globalization, but others, numerous others, have been left high and dry. Large companies have left the “heartland” to establish themselves in Mexico or China, causing this “giant sucking sound” that Texan billionaire Ross Perot had denounced during his 1992 electoral campaign against Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. The “third man” in that election had predicted that free trade would cause massive loss of industrial jobs. A true Cassandra, he had already attracted nearly 19 percent of votes.

The Establishment accused Ross Perot of being old-fashioned and populist and lost interest, but reputable journalists and sociologists heard the warning. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the years of Bill Clinton, books by Donald Barlett and James Steele, one of the most gifted duos of American investigative journalism, were testament to the social pullback of the liberalization and the unease that took over part of the country: They wrote “America: What Went Wrong?” in 1992; “America: Who Stole the Dream?” came in 1996.

The America of the ‘Relegated’

As seen from the industrial wasteland of Flint, abandoned by General Motors (and immortalized by Michael Moore’s camera), and the battered neighborhoods of Youngstown, the former Steel City, reality has had little to do with the “winning America,” from Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This other America was that of the “invisible.” They didn’t make the opening of JT or onto the glossy cover of magazines.

And yet, there it was. In her 1990 essay “Bait & Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream,” and, in 2001, in “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” Barbara Ehrenreich describes people reduced to unstable and poorly paying odd jobs, but also a middle class distressed by the “fear of falling,” worried about their future and that of their children. Since then, social surveys followed one after the other, with the result being “indignant” travels across an America of wastelands and burdened horizons, with the radical example of “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt,” published in 2012 by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco.

At the beginning of September, Roger Cohen, one of the most respected columnists of the New York Times, returned from the depressed regions of the Appalachians, at the heart of “Trump Country,” with a startling report on an America that feels abandoned at the altar of globalization. “President Obama cares more about Paris, France, than he does about Paris, Kentucky,” confided one of the people he interviewed. This feeling of relegation, sparking uncertainty and hostility, is, in part, at the root of movements that carried the campaigns of “socialist” Bernie Sanders within the Democratic party and of “nationalist-populist” Donald Trump in the Republican party.

Certainly, Donald Trump doesn’t just attract the rejects of liberalization or the “invisibles” of media coverage. He also does extremely well among folks who are comfortable but don’t want to share anything, not with the poor and especially not with blacks, Hispanics, or Muslims. It’s these “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” people, “half of Trump supporters,” as Hillary Clinton was caught saying a few days ago, triggering a whirlwind of condemnation from the right against her “social contempt.” Yes, as Charles Blow highlighted in the New York Times, many Trump voters are racist, homophobic “deplorables.” But this statement cannot make us forget that a certain Democratic elite, protected by their diplomas and incomes and conviction of belonging to a “moral generation,” has seriously neglected the social issue. And so Donald Trump is left, as masterfully described by Arlie Russell Hochschild in her book “Strangers in Their Own Land,” with the possibility of seizing upon these feelings of anxiety and injustice.

Hillary Clinton is seeking to recapture the “other half” of Donald Trump’s voters, “who are people who feel,” she said, “that government has let them down, nobody cares about them.” But, as noted by a journalist from Mother Jones, Democrats in the Rust Belt are going to have the hardest job in America: bringing back workers who are trying to see if the grass is greener on the Republican side.