Trumps Win Was About Culture. Understand This.
The media have way overstated the economic frustration of Trump’s voters. Their anger was cultural. If you get this wrong, you’ll get everything else wrong.
JACK SCHWARTZ
11.21.16 1:02 AM ET
Dire predictions that a Trump victory would send the market into a nosedive have proved premature. Quite the opposite, stocks have gone through the roof. The only question is why anyone should be surprised. Donald Trump may be the best thing that ever happened to Wall Street.
The belief of Forgotten America that Trump was somehow a champion of Main Street against Wall Street was as foolish as it was illusory. On this issue, at least, Trump cannot be accused of dissembling. He vowed not to raise tax rates on the 1 percent—which included himself—and he appears ready to keep his promise. Consequently, the tax burden will fall inequitably on the very middle-class and blue-collar faithful who voted for him, making them poorer and less equal than they already were.
Moreover, Trump’s Republican allies in Congress will now be able to promote various pet projects such as the flat tax, a regressive levy in which both the struggling and the well-to-do will have the opportunity of paying taxes at the same rate, affording an equality of sorts. And a successful GOP campaign against government regulation may well remove the remaining safeguards against financial manipulation by banks, speculators, and hedge funds, bringing back the good old days that gave us George W. Bush’s Great Recession.
As for advancing the cause of workers, Republican lawmakers are already targeting recent federal actions to grant added pay for overtime, mobilizing to undermine minimum-wage laws, and taking aim at job safety protections under the guise of removing regulatory rules that impede corporate competition. This may be the culmination of almost 40 years of union-busting, starting under Ronald Reagan, that has systematically vitiated the strength of organized labor. A Republican administration has its sights set on the National Labor Relations Board, one of the few government bodies that still offers a fair hearing in labor disputes.
The coal miners looking to Trump as a savior who’d restore their jobs had best look again. The coal industry is dying with little chance of being revived. As has been well reported, its demise came not at the hands of Washington but was wrought by competition from cheaper sources of fuel: gas, oil, shale, and renewable energy—not the least of which generates the wind and solar engines that power the agri-business of their fellow GOP voters in the Midwest, who also profit from, dare we say it, farm subsidies. The last hope of coal country is to keep exporting to its best customer, China, which would evaporate if Trump ever initiated the trade war he threatens with Beijing.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/21/trump-s-win-was-about-culture-understand-this.html
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Next time some Trump fan says that I'm showing them this. 
