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So there's a kind of a sense that both sides of the aisle had sold out the American working class. That's leading up to 2016. You have this con man in the form of Trump coming in, and he really does it, to my mind, he's the perfect Melville con man character because he takes this sort of felt experience that people do have of hypocrisy on both sides of the political aisle. And then it just wraps it in this sort of welter of lies and somehow presents himself as an outsider.
Well, four years on, we see just how much of an entitled insider he is, and I think that the gig is up. I think The New York Times tax revelations put him under a lot of pressure. I think what you saw in that debate was a man cracking, and I'll stop there and let Mark take over. But there's a lot more to say.
Paul Jay
Go ahead, Mark.
Mark Blyth
I'm not sure I have anything to add to that. I pretty much agree with all of that. What would I add to this? So, first of all, let me fess up. I never watch the debates.
Rana Faroohar
Lucky you.
Mark Blyth
And something Nassim Taleb taught me years and years and years ago was if anything truly important happens, don't watch the T.V. or read the newspapers. Three people will tell you all about it in excruciating detail the minute you wake up. And that's exactly what happened. So once I learned this, I'm not watching this right.
But nonetheless, let me put a little gloss on what Rana has said there. There was a Rand report. Now Rand isn't exactly bleeding heart liberals, as we know. And they did a report about ten days ago that said, if you kept all the taxes, the birthplace of 1980 and all the regulations and all those bad things we've gotten done away with, there wouldn't have been a huge siphoning to the top. Now we know this, but they put a dollar figure on it. The dollar figure was 50 trillion dollars of wealth that is being generated and handed effectively to the maybe top 3 percent of the country. That is the biggest transfer of wealth in history. That's what has gone on.
Now behind there's something else alive, and this is something that Rana gets into in her book on tech, is that if you look across industries, profits are becoming more concentrated, particularly in certain sectors. And the rest of the economy, in a sense, lives off the crumbs of the contracts of these giant firms, which is why in part, we have so few good jobs being developed, so many people working multiple jobs, the explosion of part-time contract platform labor, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, why do I mention all of this is as a gloss? Because ultimately, the real puzzle of the debates is why he still has 40 percent. And he has 40 percent because, unfortunately, the future is not going to be kind to the left behind. He identified that constituency in 2015 and said, I am your voice. He then seamlessly went down to the border towns, called everyone a rapist and a murderer, and assembled another coalition and bolted that together. But for the people, who we have ourselves said, you definitely got sold out by neoliberalism. Yes, you definitely got screwed by your corporate elites, etc. It's not as if it's going to get any better, whether it's through the green transition if it ever happens, whether it's through the fact that manufacturing jobs are disappearing everywhere. They're not coming back. So in a sense, what he's doing is he's doubling down on the only base he's got, and they're doubling down on him. And that is all about mobilization and anger and generating the anger and keeping it going. And if necessary, and this is the important part, shocking the system over a bridge in order to safeguard that result.
Paul Jay
Rana, go ahead.
Rana Faroohar
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