“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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New York Times Editorial: The Trump Campaign Gives License to Violence
After a weekend of violence at his rallies, Donald Trump arrived in Florida for a rally in Boca Raton on Sunday night, crowing at “how well we handled” those confrontations, because “nobody got hurt,” apparently meaning nobody got killed. Standing in an open-air amphitheater filled with thousands of supporters and surrounded by scores of police officers, this season’s version of George Wallace coyly asked, “Do we have a protester, anyone?” and “Is there a disrupter in the house?”
This is the new measure of Mr. Trump’s vile presidential campaign: stand behind a security cordon, stir up racially charged viciousness and attacks, then talk about how it symbolizes “love” from people who “want to see America be made great again.” [..]
Mr. Trump’s calls to violence are the sickest part of the con that is his presidential campaign. Yes, some people who attend his rallies are bigots; others are simply upset with a nation, or a life, that’s dealt them a bad hand.
But Mr. Trump, who blathered on about “winning” on Sunday, has not a single solid, truthful idea about how to address the roots of this seething anger. He is basking in the energy created by turning one American against another, hoping hatred will propel him to the Republican nomination.
Dean Baker:The Year of the Angry Economists
The economists are really angry this year. They have cause. Leading presidential candidates in both political parties are trashing the trade agreements that many have devoted their careers to promoting. This is not supposed to happen in the America they know.
Donald Trump has catapulted to the top of the Republican field at least in part on a commitment to renege on NAFTA and other trade agreements the United States has signed over the last quarter century. Senator Bernie Sanders remains a real contender to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in large part because of his consistent record opposing these trade deals. [..]
It is hard to know where to begin with the contempt for “free trade” economists. The trade agenda of administrations of both parties has been to quite deliberately put U.S. manufacturing workers in direct competition with low paid workers in the developing world. The predicted and actual consequence of this competition is to eliminate jobs in manufacturing and to put downward pressure on the wages of less-educated workers more generally. And the economists can’t understand why people are unhappy.
The economists’ complaints would at least be more understandable if it they were based on some consistent principle, but they aren’t. We have not sought to impose free trade everywhere. We have only done it for less well paid and less educated workers. We have maintained and in some cases strengthened protectionist barriers that sustain the jobs and paychecks of the most highly paid professionals.
Howard Fineman: This Election Is 1968 All Over Again, And That’s Not A Good Thing
It was the spring of a presidential election year, but there was no sense of hope and renewal in the land.
Instead, the United States was in the grip of tribalism and seething fear. Voters were energized by anger and resentment. The media ran red with violent language; surging crowds, cops and protesters filled city streets.
The main candidates were: a shopworn Democratic front-runner who embodied the party establishment; a white-haired, professorial anti-war protest candidate beloved by college students; a disruptive, race-baiting outsider with a knack for drawing press attention; and an unctuous, beady-eyed Republican lawyer practicing dirty tricks.
At its nominating convention in a Midwestern city that summer, one of the two political parties was torn apart, both inside the hall and out, as protestors clashed with police, who, it was later determined, were the instigators of the riots.
The general election hinged on which party could woo the most votes of a white working class that had been energized in the first place by the outsider candidate, who had railed against a powerful “Them” against “Us.”
That was 1968, not 2016.
Richard North Patterson: The GOP’s Strongman Syndrome
Has it struck you by now that Donald Trump is, in the deepest of ways, not right?
I don’t mean on the issues, though that’s true enough. I’m suggesting something far more troubling — a personality disorder which feeds, and is empowered by, a profound disturbance among Americans at large. 2016 is the year that megalomania became a movement.
The symptoms of personal instability and societal destabilization abound — not least the violence erupting from the mass anger Trump inspires — and the implications are grave indeed. The moral importance of this subject transcends, but emanates from, the state of the Republican race. So please hold the deeper thought while we pause to contemplate Trump’s continuing rise, and thus the stakes in today’s primaries and beyond.
Robert Reich: Here’s the Truth About Free Trade
Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are blaming free-trade deals for the decline of working-class jobs and incomes. Are they right?
Clearly, America has lost a significant number of factory jobs over the last three decades. In 1980, 1 in 5 Americans worked in manufacturing. Now it’s 1 in 12.
Today Ohio has a third fewer manufacturing jobs than it had in 2000. Michigan is down 32 percent.
Trade isn’t the only culprit. Technological change has also played a part.
When I visit one of America’s remaining factories, I rarely see assembly-line workers. I don’t see many workers at all. Instead, I find a handful of technicians sitting behind computer screens. They’re linked to fleets of robots and computerized machine tools who do the physical work.
There’s a lively debate among researchers as to whether trade or technology is more responsible for the decline in factory jobs. In reality the two can’t be separated.
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