Nice Shootin', Ogmius!

First, you could negotiate anything. Then you could project an image. I didn't speak up. Not loudly enough. There was money to be made. LOTS OF IT. Good luck catching the giddy horde's attention. Xeroxed 'zines weren't enough, not with shelves of self-help books at B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks.

"Negotiation" is already a charged word. Add “anything,” and it starts to sound like a manual for Jedi mind tricks. If you’re sensitive to the ethics of influence—and I am—that can spark a defensive, ironic stance.

The rhythm of the title echoes the genre of “You Too Can…” manuals that often oversell simple techniques as universal solutions. Your inner critic hears the pitch before you even open the book. But it's really the intent behind the salesman vibe, which saturated the air. The implication is that there is not enough to go around anymore. Compassion is for saps!

A long arc of economic dislocation, humiliation, and institutional abandonment, followed by a political eruption that feels like a wounded class trying to claw back dignity. That intuition isn’t misplaced — but the picture is more layered than a simple “the losers strike back.” Economic dislocation is a major driver — but not the only one. Scholars point out that Trumpism is rooted in long‑term transformations that began after the Cold War, including deepening inequality and the collapse of shared economic security. One analysis notes that Trump’s worldview frames the economy as a zero‑sum contest of winners and losers, resonating with people who feel they’ve been pushed to the losing side of globalization and deindustrialization. 

That doesn’t mean every supporter is economically distressed, but the cultural meaning of decline — loss of status, loss of respect, loss of a coherent place in the national story — is central.

Ye gods there be "Innovation Deserts" and “left‑behind” regions. Research on “technology deserts” shows that counties with low innovation capacity — places bypassed by the knowledge economy — were far more likely to support Trump. These areas experienced the downsides of globalization without the compensating benefits of high‑tech growth. This supports my sense that the victims of economic restructuring are seeking a form of political redress.

But Trumpism isn’t only a revolt of the economically harmed. Polling shows that the core of the Trump coalition remains white working‑class voters and some working‑class Latino and Asian American voters — groups that have experienced economic and cultural marginalization. But it also includes voters motivated by cultural anxiety, religious radicalization, and fears of demographic change. What a stew-pot. The “strike back” isn’t purely economic; it’s also symbolic, cultural, and identity‑driven. So was the original Puritan movement (including its hypocritical antinomianism).

The emotional logic: humiliation, abandonment, and the search for agency. This is where what's left of my compassion lands most accurately. Deindustrialization didn’t just remove jobs; it removed meaning, status, and the social infrastructure that held communities together. Stakeholders were part of an unwritten  social contract. The revolutionary for the hell of it  dissolved this in acid. Only shareholders were left. When institutions fail to protect people, they often turn to figures who promise to punish the system that abandoned them.

Trumpism channels resentment (really rizonty-mohhhhhnnnnnnhhh) at elites who profited from restructuring, anger at institutions perceived as corrupt or indifferent, a desire to reassert dignity through confrontation rather than accommodation. I know they're creationists and climate-change deniers, but a prosperous economy could have educated their children better and gradually, when incremental change was an option.

It’s not “losers striking back” in a pejorative sense — it’s a wounded class trying to reclaim agency in the only arena left to them: politics. Interesting sidelight on the role of the state. This isn't only a clash of factions; it's a struggle over the machinery that can still make anything happen at all. At this point, the only remaining structure with enough coercive capacity to impose order or enact large-scale reform is the state, so every faction - reformist, reactionary, revolutionary - tries to seize it. Voluntary cooperation got dented real bad in the Hateful '80s, and losers become more vicious. You've got the dominant minority trying to preserve its privileges, a sectoral rival from the country's founding, a rising reformist minority trying to break the duopoly, and the masses pulled in all directions. Each group believes the state must be captured to restore order or justice. Each sees the other as an existential threat. That's why Times of Trouble feel so apocalyptic: every faction believes it is fighting for survival. The dislocated look to the state as the only remaining protector. Meanwhile elites (and there are plenty) who stand to benefit from the old arrangement or scent blood from a remolded one converge on the same objective: control the state or be crushed by those who do.

The movement is being shaped by elites, not just victims. One of the ironies is that Trumpism is both a bottom‑up expression of grievance and a top‑down project that redirects those grievances toward cultural enemies rather than structural causes.

The people harmed by hostile takeovers, greenmail, and deindustrialization are not the ones who designed Trumpism — but they are the ones whose pain it mobilizes.

And there are other mobilizations: the gilded Skinner Box that pacified a hefty percentage of would-be discontents is getting plagiarized for imagery by AI.

Institutional decay and social fragmentation create openings for charismatic, polarizing figures. I hope there aren't any more out there to replace Trump.