LONDON
— I’ve actually been watching the early Trump presidency from London.
(I would have gone to the moon, but I couldn’t get a ride.) Even from
here I have vertigo.
My
head is swirling from “alternative facts,” trade deals canceled,
pipelines initiated, Obamacare in the Twilight Zone and utterly bizarre
rants about attendance on Inauguration Day and fake voters on Election
Day. Whatever this cost Vladimir Putin, he’s already gotten his money’s
worth — a chaos president. Pass the vodka.
But
moderate Republicans, independents and Democrats who opposed Donald
Trump need to beware. He can make you so nuts — he can so vacuum your
brains out — that you can’t think clearly about the most important
questions today: What things are true even if Trump believes them, and
therefore merit support? And where can Democrats offer smarter
approaches on issues, like jobs, for instance — approaches that can
connect to the guts of working-class voters as Trump did, but provide a
smarter path forward.
Where
Trump’s instinct is not wrong is on the need to strike a better
long-term trading arrangement with China. But I worry about his
pugnacious tactics. I would be negotiating with Beijing in total secret.
Let everybody save face. If he smacks China with “America First,” China
will smack him with “China First,” and soon we’ll have a good ol’ trade
war.
Where
I think Democrats should focus their critique, and fresh thinking, is
how we actually bring back more middle-class jobs. A day barely goes by
without Trump threatening some company that plans to move jobs abroad or
build a factory in Mexico, not America.
If
Trump’s bullying can actually save good jobs, God bless him. But what
Trump doesn’t see is that while this may get him some short-term jobs
headlines, in the long-run C.E.O.s may prefer not to build
their next factory in America, precisely because it will be hostage to
Trump’s Twitter lashings. They also may quietly replace more workers
with robots faster, because Trump can’t see or complain about that.
“Trump
wants to protect jobs,” explained Gidi Grinstein, who heads the Israeli
policy institute Reut. “What we really need is to protect workers.”
You
need to protect workers, not jobs, because every worker today will most
likely have to transition multiple times to multiple jobs as the pace
of change accelerates. So the best way you help workers is by ensuring
that they are flexible — that they have the skills, safety nets, health
care and lifelong learning opportunities to make those leaps and that
they live in cities open to innovation, entrepreneurship and high-I.Q.
risk-takers.
The societal units protecting workers best are our healthy communities
— where local businesses, philanthropies, the public school system and
universities, and local government come together to support a permanent
education-to-work-to-life-long-skill-building pipeline.
Businesses
signal to schools and colleges, in real time, the skills they need to
thrive in the global economy, and philanthropies fund innovative
programs for supplemental education and training. Schools also serve as
adult learning and social service centers — and local and state
governments support them all, including reaching out globally for
investors and new markets.
Eric
Beinhocker, executive director of the Institute for New Economic
Thinking at Oxford, calls this the “new progressive localism.” For too
long, he argues, “progressives have been so focused on Washington,
they’ve missed the fact that most of the progress on the issues they
care about — environment, education, economic opportunity and work-force
skills — has happened at the local level. Because that is where trust
lives.” Trust is what enables you to adapt quickly and experiment often,
i.e., to be flexible. And there is so much more trust on the local
level than the national level in America today.
When
Trump strong-arms a company to retain jobs, but kills Obamacare without
a credible alternative, he is saving jobs but hurting workers, because
he is making workers less secure and less flexible.
Another
of Trump’s jobs fallacies is that regulation always holds companies
back. In some cases it does, and thoughtful deregulation can help. But
Trump’s argument that we must ignore climate science because steadily
upgrading clean energy standards for our power, auto and construction
companies kills jobs is pure nonsense.
Fact:
California has some of the highest clean energy standards for cars,
buildings and electric utilities in America. And those standards have
kept California one of the world’s leaders in clean-tech companies and
start-ups, and its jobs and overall economy have grown steadily since
2010.
“The
Golden State has more than half a million advanced energy jobs,” says
Energy Innovation C.E.O. Hal Harvey. “That’s 10 times more — in this
state alone — than total U.S. coal jobs.” Trump’s strategy is to “make
America last” on clean energy and to double down on coal. Insane.
In
sum, Democrats should and can take the language of “strength” away from
Trump and own it themselves. They should be for strong workers, not
strong walls; for building strong communities, not relying on a
strongman to strong-arm employers; and for strong standards to create
strong companies. Those would be my fightin’ words.
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