Why Are You So Angry?

I have an American friend – an estimable person in ever so many ways. A great companion, funny, lively, bright and loyal, the sort of man who’d always have your back if the chips were down. He is a devout Irish Catholic from a large family.  He attended Dayton University where he started all four years as a defensive back.  Now retired, he put in forty years with a small steel fabrication company that moved him to the Carolinas where he still lives with his lovely Canadian wife.

It is no news that we live in the age of grievance politics. Let us grant that many Americans, particularly many of those whose collars are, or were formerly, blue, the inner city poor, the displaced, the badly educated, the subprime mortgage victims, have real grievances. We also know that middle-class income growth in the U.S. has been stagnant for a generation and a half now testing the belief in linear upward mobility – one of the most sacred assumptions under-girding the American Dream − more than it has ever been tested in the long history of the Republic. That there are potent currents of anger and frustration flooding in the direction of political, business and media elites does not surprise me in the least.

Well there it is, a not unrepresentative day in the life of my resolutely middle-class friend. There I am, his over-the-shoulder Virgil and I can’t resist asking him, “Okay Frank, what the hell are you so mad about.” Now it is important to note that my friend is not an intellectual, he is not wrathful in some highly theoretical sense — he is not a libertarian on steroids. Nor do I think that he has massive empathy for America’s downtrodden. He grew up, a tough South-side Chicago boy and made his own way in the world. And he would say I think, so should we all.

As a Canadian and someone with some reasonably hard-won economic literacy, I do care about the Pedro’s and the Song Ye’s of the world, and the Amhed’s and the Raghit Sing’s. And this is not because I am some saintly humanitarian. If the Chinese and Indian middle classes continue to grow and prosper, this represents such a massive potential increase in the world’s overall wealth, that it will be a thundering torrent of prosperity floating all boats including mine and my children’s. They need a liberal trade environment to make this happen. I don’t give a damn what Trump thinks about guns or proposes to do about America’s healthcare system. But, I do care deeply about the prospect of devolution in world trade.

When the Greatest of all Republicans called America, “the last, best hope of earth“, note that he said earth, meaning the planet. He did not see in his mind’s eye a walled America, turned inward, its people peeking over the tops of their parapets with skeptical and hostile eyes. The world needs America to continue to be a beacon and a model, to welcome and assimilate immigrants, to trade and to advocate for more liberal trade policy. Their own self-interest requires this if they can only see it. Trump stands for a myopic fortress America, a dead-end vision, selfish and self-defeating.