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From Whence Came Trumpism? Two Takes.
Over the last few months, there have been many attempts to explain why the deepest bench in Republican Party history fizzled when faced down by a man with no political experience, no ideological consistency, and no ties to the party he chose to run in for the presidency. Often hinted at (but never said forthrightly) were the ideas that Trump’s support came from racists or hillbillies. Now these accusations have been addressed by Avik Roy and J.D. Vance.
Roy, who’s worked for Romney, Perry, and Rubio, is considered the go-to healthcare wonk on the Right. He is described in this Vox article/interview as a Republican’s Republican, though they might just as easily have said that he’s an avatar of much of what those who support Trump hate. The editorial style of Vox is probably responsible, but Roy comes off as having a right-back-at-you disdain for those who rejected all the non-Trump candidates this season. He calls out the Republican Party (and even conservatism in general) for suffering from latent racism and white nationalism.
When I first read the Vox piece, I wondered if Roy had lost his mind. He says:
Conservative intellectuals, and conservative politicians, have been in kind of a bubble. We’ve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism — philosophical, economic conservatism. In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.
And:
It’s a common observation on the left, but it’s an observation that a lot of us on the right genuinely believed wasn’t true — which is that conservatism has become, and has been for some time, much more about white identity politics than it has been about conservative political philosophy.
In Roy’s view, Trump proves the Left’s caricature of the right as the party of aggrieved whites pining for the days of racial supremacy.
J.D. Vance is a rather different sort. Though educated at Yale Law School, Vance began life Appalachia and the rust belt of central Ohio. It took one tough Mamaw and the US Marine Corps to aim him toward heights far above his raising. Discussing his book Hillbilly Elegy with with Rod Dreher he sees a different cause for the Trump phenomenon found in the people and problems of Appalachia and flyover country.
Vance offers an alternative view that paints a bleak, but a little less-disheartening picture.
The simple answer is that these people – my people – are really struggling, and there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time. Donald Trump at least tries.
[…]
The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades. From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues, a la Thomas Frank (more on that below). Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.
From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth. Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth (and I believe there are many), the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very real social crisis. More importantly, these policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.
Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears.
While I think Roy paints the entire Republican party and Trump’s supporters with the colors of the fringest of elements, I don’t think Vance accurately portrays the whole of this year’s electorate either. There is no one-size-fits-all explanation for why Donald Trump is our nominee instead of Walker, or Perry, or Rubio, or Cruz. I do, however, there is some truth in what both men said. The party of Trump often times sounds like a South Park episode with a bunch of men hollering “They took our jerbs!” When I talk to Trump supporters in my workplace, I hear people who don’t want speeches about tax cuts and policy details; rather, they simply want what feels like a meaningful say in the outcome of their own lives. I hear in their voices the same despair with broken promises and jellied spines from Republican politicians that I get from the smart people here who have placed their faith in Trump.
After reading these (and other) theories I still have no full or settled explanation of why Trump. As usual, I find myself with unanswered questions and the “start a conversation” button begging me to search here for answers.
Published in General
Canada by law has a price limit set to be the median of a bunch of other western countries, including the US.
Suppose we adopted the same policy. If all the countries can charge no more than the median price, all will charge the same price. How the price would be set is a mystery to me. But one thing I do foresee is a virtual halt to the development of new drugs. I would rather have today’s drugs at today’s US prices than 1970 drugs at 1970 prices.
If this problem of cost-sharing is to be solved, it has to be through some mechanism other than simply not paying for our drugs.
Agreed. Canada’s price not the market price.
That doesn’t mean, though, that us more libertarian-oriented folks should oppose American consumers undercutting high American drug prices by outsourcing their prescriptions to foreign countries or the veterinary market. I say, why not, if you can manage it?
There are risks, of course, including the risk of useful drugs not being developed as American consumers’ payment of development costs dries up. But if that puts pressure on other consumers to shoulder some of the development cost, perhaps the eventual result would be the real market prices King Prawn describes. Maybe that prescription that once cost $100 to fill in the US but $10 to surreptitiously outsource to Canada equilibrates at $50, more than $10 but still less than $100. Or something like that.
I am still young enough that, if I got caught circumventing some US law in order to take care of my health affordably, I wouldn’t yet have that “harmless old lady vibe”, and I’d expected to be treated more like a drug trafficker or similar lowlife. Plus, it’s not always easy to arrange. But it’s that, not principles, that keeps me from doing it.
I’m fine with all of this. What you don’t see here is any government negotiation of drug prices.
Oh, I’m all for letting prices rise elsewhere. Market balkanization is popular with business and government alike, but it reinforces itself. If Microsoft want to charge $100 for MS-Clip in the states, then the exchange rate should set that price overseas, not “carefully crafted” regional price policies.
How many parsecs is that?
You agree that the Canadian price is less than the market price, but you believe that libertarian oriented folks should get the government to compel people to sell them goods at that price? Is this a conflation of “libertarian folks” with “folks with no respect for the law”?
It’s so many parsecs that Han Solo would have run out of fuel, and so far away in another universe that he wouldn’t have shot first.
Golly.
I know I’m mere Trumpkin, but it seems to me that when neither the Canada price nor the United States price are set by anything resembling a market force then perhaps we have a problem, ground control.
We cannot know what the market price would be in the absence of a free market. We should not attempt to assume what they would be, based upon our warm evaluation of the present system, especially if we assume that present prices are in any way rationally set.
Other peoples money, spent on other people- yeah, I’m guessing that isn’t money well spent.
Huh?
I’m not sure I follow.
Usually, gray and black markets aren’t “get[ting] the government to compel people to sell them goods at [some mandated] price”, but just sorta working around what’s already out there.
The intent, aside from selfish savings, of gray- or black-marketing healthcare is not to support the Canadian or any other government’s efforts to compel others, but rather to undermine those efforts.
Had I been more of a troublemaker in high school, I would have organized a protest against the free condoms the nurse’s office handed out that involved the protestors taking massive amounts of condoms for stuff other than sex. Turn ’em into balloons or something. The goal of such a protest would of course be to get the nurse’s office to decide handing out free condoms wasn’t worth it and so stop.
If you’re buying a good using a system that involves the government compelling sales at a below market price, I’m not sure how you’re not getting the government to do what you’re getting the government to do.
Such a protest might be effective because you’d tell people about it and because you’re reasonably close to the level at which condom distribution decisions are made. If your protest takes the form of taking free condoms that you’re not entitled to (perhaps, for instance, you’re an adult taking them from the high school’s condom supply), you use the condoms for sex, you coordinate with too few people for your condom usage to make much of a difference to the school, and you don’t tell people what you’re doing, it may be that your intent would be some sort of noble Alinskyite effort, but the practice would look very much that of someone who didn’t want to pay.
I agree that there are problems with government intervention in the US market, too, but it seems hard to dispute the claim that the system is more of a free market than it is in the countries where prices are set by the government.
I agree that it’s hard to know what an ideal market price would be. I was responding to a specific claim that I found surprising rather than claiming to have a strong sense of what Pfzier should charge for its products.
If I could figure out how to do it with little enough risk, I would want to tell others how to do it, though perhaps with care for anonymity if they don’t go after those who just do it for themselves, but do go after those who tell others.
As it is, I’m not doing it, which is as good a reason as any for not spreading the word on how to do it.
I get what is being said by all here, but I still would like for those who support free trade to say why they think it is fine for me not to be allowed to buy prescription drugs from Canadian sources. Isn’t that prohibition similar to having a tariff? And isn’t doing things to insure continued research and development for drugs in the United States in some ways similar to doing thing to keep manufacturing jobs here?
For the most part, these aren’t Canadian drugs. The cost difference isn’t a product of the market, but of a government intervention. With drugs you can’t buy in the US I can see the complaint about trade barriers, but very little reimportation has a legitimate basis.
I’m thinking that large scale purchases of drugs by Americans at lower Canadian prices would lead to shortages in Canada. Alleviating the shortage would require an increase in the price so that American manufacturers would be willing to supply more. Eventually the American and Canadian prices should equilibrate. Otherwise, there is an arbitrage opportunity for Canadian sellers to charge more than the Canadian but less than the American price to American buyers.
Dang.
Yup. The upshot is that the US Government is holding prices artificially high here at home, farming the plebes for the benefit of their foreign friends and domestic sponsors.
I’ll dispute it, because I’m that guy.
In places where the price is set by the government, there is a still necessarily a negotiation between the drug companies and the governments. If the governments aren’t offering an acceptable price, the drug companies can refuse to do business. If the governments are unwilling to pay what is demanded, they can walk away. This looks like a market transaction to me.
In the United States, the government is forbidden by law from negotiating for bulk discounts. It pays whatever the drug companies demand, and cannot walk away. This looks like the Soviet Union to me.
Fair enough. I’m not going to try and claim I know what the ideal market price should be, not least because I obviously don’t.
My understanding is that individual medicare part D plans negotiate drug prices. If there are substitutes they should be able to negotiate a decent price.
Several sellers and several buyers is how a fair price is reached. If the government negotiates and cannot reach a deal and walks away, how does that benefit consumers, who might be willing, through their plans, to pay more than the government was willing to offer?
My understanding differs, and I freely admit that I could be wrong. I don’t think so, however.
I agree. This is my preferred option.
In actual practice this seems to have never happened. But it could.
My understanding of why, which I again admit could be wrong, is that the drug companies still find it profitable to do business at the prices other governments are willing to pay, either because those prices are still profitable for them, or because they know their costs can be covered by raising prices on Americans.
If the argument was that the Canadian price more accurately reflected the free market price, then I’d not have disagreed. I hadn’t thought that that argument might be made (the non-governmental purchase of drugs in the US seems clearly more free than in Canada), but I’m happy to withdraw my implication that the assumption was non-contentious.
100% agree. It’s the only explanation.
It is possible it could be about uncontrolled low skill immigration, destruction of the military, a feckless and dangerous foreign policy including giving Iran nukes and a free run in the middle east, a hostile anti-Israel policy and the wanton destruction of the American manufacturing base.
But go with emotional rage if that works for you. No policy difference need apply.
Hold up, dude. I don’t see any space between your list of policy failures and Codevilla’s explanation. Aren’t they the same thing?
“I lean more toward Codevilla’s explanation that the ruling class has simply stepped on those they mean to rule too hard and too frequently, and Trump is the ultimate slap in the face for them.”
My reaction was to your sentence above. Some of us do politics for issues, not slaps in the face or being stepped on.
Your sentence to me implied the “Trump Phenomenon” was driven by anger and revenge, which I derived from your language of stepping on and slaps in the face. If I should have read that any other way, please let me know.
To me, the candidates other than Trump were better at not offending, better at not saying things which get attention and wrong on many key issues. Just wrong. So to pick someone who is not wrong on key issues can be done from an issue point alone, not an emotional reaction.
TKC, friendly fire.
Sorry about that. I blame senility. I lived long enough to get to use it and I feel entitled.
Just kidding. I read it wrong then and my apologies.
Next time it will be senility.