Trade
policies dictate the contours of American economy, an economy that has shifted
to the technologically advanced and highly-skilled industries. It’s these trade
policies that has companies looking for cheaper and cheaper labor in new
markets. Is it any wonder that D. Trump has no idea where his ties(from his
clothing brand) are made?
Working
for a tech company has made me painfully aware of the inequities between tech
and non-tech. It manifests itself in the skyrocketing cost of rent in the Bay
Area, exasperated by supply and demand. It manifests itself in the form of
income inequality. It manifests itself in violence.
A
creature of this start-up culture in the Bay: a 20-something male tech worker so
self-involved with personal fitness (think Crossfit) and microbrews whose idea
of a good time is doing drugs at a rave. They clone each other—when a trend
changes, so do they.
This is
in no way a criticism of the influx of tech companies in the Bay (plenty of
people have done that). Cities change. Societies change—we either fight it or
adapt.
But
there’s something ontologically wrong with the preponderance of such obvious culturally-
cloned subjects. As David Foster Wallace explored in Infinite Jest, the
striving to be—to accomplish, to be on top—is self-fulfilling. There is no ‘there,’
there is no pinnacle of achievement; he writes, “The alternative is
unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant
gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”
I
wonder if we’ve defaulted to this unconscious state of black-and-white,
us-vs-them, Manichean thinking. Separate, but related questions—who is the ‘us’?
who is the ‘them’? Perhaps we have no idea who ‘they’ are. Perhaps we are
striving for something—success—that can only really exist in the mind?
It’s in
this respect that I think we should really consider where Trump’s support comes
from. Not the specific demographic that supports him—mostly white, non-college
educated, etc—but what unites these people to support a billionaire. Maybe we’ve
become too comfortable in our own thinking to imagine why such people would
distrust politics and politicians in general. Maybe we’ve lost our empathy for
the poor and the marginalized—a nation in which 46 million live in poverty, in
which 14 million cannot even read.
This is where I hope the dialogue will go: a sincere discussion of how to take into account the marginalized. Because I don’t think the self-involved tech worker and the average Donald Trump supporter are too different at all. Each has their own agenda—each has hopes and fears—each is as much a product of ideology as the other. Maybe reality exists outside of the reality in our own heads. Maybe Trump has a point.
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