There are many ways to view, and analyse, the recent US Presidential Election, and I’d guess that I may have spent far too much time on this.
(Megyn Kelly doesn’t miss much)
Personally, having made a few dollars on the result, mostly from an unusually judicious and lucky bet at 9/4, some twelve months before the election, I’d guess that Trump won, mostly, because the Democrats have been persistently alienating their traditional, and core, vote since Hillary Clinton described so many of them as ‘a basket of deplorables’ in 2016. Having Joe Biden add to this by describing all MAGA supporters as ‘garbage’ may not have elicited a happy response.
Turns out that insulting 50% of the electorate, instead of trying to persuade them that you have the right policies, may not be very clever. Who knew?
The rise, and rise, of a middle-class elite, in UK terms, across most of the Western political firmament since the mid-1990s has resulted in the exclusion of what used to be the ‘Working Class’ in sociological and political terms. This has seen some reduction in the number of politically driven strikes in UK, compared with the 1970s and 1980s, although not in France which is more politically polarised than ever.
The most conspicuous example of this powerful middle-class elite is the European Commission which rules, largely unquestioned, politically unopposed, and completely unelected.
(Let’s not forget that Sir Keir Starmer wants to steer this country back into a closer relationship with the European Commission.)
Somebody, or other, probably Tony Blair, once said that ‘We’re all middle-class now’…and, to some extent, this is true, as the gaps which once characterised a population comprising the manual workers, at the lower end of the scale, the office workers in the middle, and the higher paid, graduate workers in both public and private sectors, have narrowed considerably over the last 50 years.
For example, the median pay rates for graduate office workers after ten years in post tend to fall short of the rates paid for railway engine drivers which go from £65,000 to North of Aberdeen, and over £100,000 a year. Most of them earn considerably more than airline pilots.
As I shall be flying with Air Pacific next April on the Singapore/Fiji flight, I shall make a point of finding out how much the pilots are earning, and whether this is as much as the driver of a railway engine from Euston to Glasgow. My guess is that they will be on about £40,000 a year…tops.
As it happens, apart from a small number at the top of the scale with BA, few airline pilots flying for commercial airlines in the UK earn much over £50,000 a year. A London Tube driver, on a largely automated network, can expect to earn this much after ten years on the job as basic pay, and quite a lot more with union mandated overtime.
In general terms, in the US, almost everybody is now ‘middle class’ and this term has been used to subsume the ‘blue collar’, aspirational, workers who used to be the bedrock and beating heart of the Democratic Party. Bruce Springsteen fractured his vocal chords, and my eardrums, with a cry for help to this disappeared constituency at one of Kamala Harris’s rallies. It was excruciating and, apparently, went largely unheard. One must be grateful for small mercies.
In the UK we now have a Labour Government which can’t actually define ‘working people’ because it’s lost its traditional ‘Working Class’, and has replaced it with a relatively affluent, heavily public sector-weighted, middle-class electorate, bolstered by a large, welfare claimant, dependent class, along with a new few millions of grateful recent immigrants. Put me down for a NCHI and a visit from the Bill.
At this point, I should like to have it noted that there are 5.51 million Small to Medium-sized Enterprises in UK. SMEs account for 60% of employment in UK and 48% of national business turnover. They employ 16.70 million people. This is where the productive middle class is in the UK. If you include the majority of farmers in this category, I can assure you that there aren’t too many of them who are taking home more than railway engine drivers and, per hour, a hell of a lot less.
Politically, there are many more factors in play here. The capture of the national/state education systems from primary schools to universities, in both the UK and the US, by the left/liberal ‘progressives’ should pretty much guarantee an output of younger voters who will be inclined to vote Labour/Democrat, regardless of candidates and policies, in the future, ceteris paribus.
Demographically, this would appear to be a likely forecast. Old voters die and are replaced by young voters more inclined to the left/liberal orthodoxy? It’s been conventional wisdom for some years.
However, looking a little more closely at the US elections data, it seems that not all under 35 years old voters voted for the left/progressive candidate, Kamala Harris.
Astonishingly, to me at least, the breakdown of the US Presidential Election results shows the 18-29 age voting 42% for Trump, and the 30-44 age voting 46% for Trump, which surprised me a little, and cheered my cynical, jaded soul.
This last US election was, certainly, a milestone in Western politics. Whether it proves to be a signpost as well remains to be seen. Fingers crossed?
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