TF

The first glimmer of rationality dawned when some analysts noticed a study from Anne Case and Angus Deaton on mortality rates. The two economists found that death rates for poorly educated white, non-Hispanics have soared since 1999.

This kind of data, which brings to mind the demographic disasters that attended the collapse of the Soviet Union and its brief experiment with unfettered markets, stands out like a neon light in a fog of ideology. There is no way you can square it with stories about how great everything is.

Not surprisingly, analysts who looked had little trouble finding striking correlations with the Trump vote in counties where death rates were unusually high. No single variable model of mass voting is going to be definitive, but I think here reality was trying to send a message, however the controversies finally come out about the exact role gender plays in the phenomenon.

The other telltale fact is the generational gap in the Clinton/Sanders support. The splits on age within the Democratic vote were often mind-boggling, almost like falling off a cliff, as younger cohorts swarmed headlong for Sanders.

Various analysts have opined that this reflects some kind of confusion or just youthful exuberance. I think those claims are wildly misleading. The correlation of success in the core economy and age is substantial among voters (who tend to be more affluent).

As William Lazonick and others have emphasized, the globalization of production and the financialization of American large firms has dramatically changed labor markets.

They have hollowed out traditional career tracks even in the primary sectors. In addition, large firms now subcontract more and more work to contractors, who themselves rely on unskilled labor.

For young people, the implications are huge. None of them can reasonably expect to build a career within a single large firm and grow within it.

Job tenure in firms has shortened dramatically; traditional defined-benefit pensions are gone; pensions of any type are much scarcer; and people change jobs very frequently.

Vast numbers of people who would like full-time positions are working part time. Young people, even in the tech sector, see this very clearly and understand what it means for them.

In addition, as Temin explains, higher education is the ticket to jobs in the affluent core. Desperate young people know that. But with the state’s withdrawal of support for public higher education, many have no choice but to take on high levels of debt.

Sanders picked up on that dominating reality, and he and his staff displayed a great deal of interest and sympathy for the idea of debt relief and public financing for college education.

But to really understand what is happening, you have to go beyond all the particulars and critically evaluate the whole. The system hasn’t worked for many Americans for at least a generation, and vast numbers of them now realize this.

Yet they aren’t hearing any acknowledgement from the political establishments of either major party. All they hear is partisan posturing and gobbledygook. And, as polls show conclusively, most Americans are very, very aware that political money sloshes everywhere in the system.

There is more. Establishment economists have discredited themselves first by failing to foresee the catastrophe of 2008 and then nattering on about the “new normal,” “green shoots,” the wonders of quantitative easing, and, recently, carrying on about the need to raise interest rates, instead of recognizing how the world has crumbled for so many of the 99 percent.

It’s good that some mainstream economists have finally recognized that their naïve faith that free markets would guarantee the reemployment of workers displaced by imports was horribly wrong — but it’s too late.

Mistrusting not only the political establishment, but “experts,” the mass media, and even official high culture, many in the electorate are convinced that the system is rigged.

As a consequence, they just shrug off inconsistencies of candidates they believe are trying to tell the truth to them. They increasingly think in classic “friend or foe” terms and just tune out those who they perceive as tools of the establishment.

In the 2016 primaries, we’ve had what my friend Walter Dean Burnham likes to call a “runaway” electorate. I entirely agree with him that the best parallel to what has happened is the sequence of elections in the 1850s in which the Whig Party collapsed.

When you see whole areas laid waste in just a few years — as globalization and the transportation revolution did in the middle of the nineteenth century — you should expect big chunks of the electorate to behave like a headless horseman.

I don’t think we can partial out precisely which aspects of globalization drove which primaries right now. But even mainstream economists admit that they way underestimated the impact of imports on the US economy, especially from China after 2001.

The Obama administration’s failure to push through a robust recovery program was a miscalculation of historic proportions and led to the 2010 congressional disaster that has defined the American political universe up till now.

The president’s insistence on trying to work with Republicans and his early interest in cutting, not defending, programs like Social Security did nothing to mitigate the effects of that earthquake.

The Federal Reserve’s “green shoots” nonsense and its programs of quantitative easing, I think, did little for ordinary Americans, while stimulating a stock market boom that just helped the 1 percent. It couldn’t make up for the failure to use fiscal policy.