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Analysis
How'd Donald Trump win the White House? It’s a vexing question with a least a half a dozen good explanations. Among them: a nationalist bent, fear of change, the destruction of the rust belt, blue-collar flight to the right—each one played a substantial role.
As did technology.
It's supposed to be our magic carpet to a new existence. Automation, globalization, arm-chair shopping, ready-access to the history of the world and an unprecedented tap into the roiling white-water rapids of our shared public consciousness. How could you not understand your fellow humans as so many of them reveal their deepest and most personal concerns online so regularly?
It's safe to say that level of understanding never arrived. Technology, it turns out, is just as apt to grind up the working class as it is to turn into a vehicle for prosperity.
“Living standards among the working class has declined sharply as the economy has de-industrialized,” warned American Urban Studies Professor Richard Florida, in a 2014 post on what he calls the “creative class,” those who may have benefited the most from a post-industrialized society.
Florida continued:
The creative class makes up about a third of the U.S. workforce. Its 41 million members — who include knowledge workers in science, technology, innovation and engineering; business, healthcare and legal professionals; and arts, music, design, media and entertainment — earned more than $70,000 per year on average in 2010, accounting for roughly half of all U.S. wages. Creative class workers earned more than double the $30,000 average that America’s nearly 60 million routine service workers did, and twice the $34,000 that the 26 million members of the blue-collar working class earned on average.
It never occurred to those aforementioned "knowledge workers" clustered along the country’s coasts that Trump was speaking a special language to large swath of the country not in the thrall of the tech revolution—in other words, that Trump was speaking to blue-collar America who felt as though the economy of the "knowledge worker" had left them behind.
These disenfranchised voters don’t look at technology and innovation the same way as voters in densely populated metropolitan areas do, places where innovation is the engine of opportunity.
“New technologies always destabilize the old order,” said Columbia Business School professor and speaker Rita McGrath. McGrath, who studies and frequently speaks publicly about innovation and economic growth, and I were speaking just hours after Trump’s stunning upset victory. I wondered if the technology we thought would save the world and help lift America’s working class was somehow failing them.
McGrath agreed that, at least from an historical perspective, it isn’t always easy for people to embrace new technologies, even when they could, in fact, demonstrably improve their lives.
“People who are comfortable in old order often resist the new,” she noted. She was reminded of how, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, the British government forced every early automobile owner to have someone walk in front of the vehicle with a flag to warn pedestrians of its approach. In other words, the car could go no faster than a human can walk.
The idea that in the 21st century anyone would be afraid of innovation might seem ridiculous. Then again, so does the notion that people living in metropolitan centers like New York City and San Francisco have anything in common with those living in rural Kentucky, or coal-mining Pennsylvania.
Not with the program
Trump’s electoral victory was powered by some of the nation’s poorest regions: The south, the nation’s heartland and the northwest (excluding coastal states). If one were to overlay a 2014 Census poverty map with a Brookings Institute map analyzing broadband penetration and then the 2016 Presidential election electoral voting map, one would see a strong correlation between poverty, tech penetration and broad voting patterns.
An October, 2015, Pew Research Center Study on The Demographics of Device Ownership consistently put rural America at the bottom of adoption rates. Smartphone ownership is exploding, but while urban and suburban localities sat at 72% and 70% penetration, respectively, in 2015, rural areas were only at 52% (overall cellphone penetration, though, is consistently above 85%).
The Electoral College map, U.S. poverty map and share of broadband households map
Image: GOOGLE, /CENSUS BUREAU/BROOKINGS INSTITUTE
U.S. 2014 census data put broadband penetration at 75%, but as the Brookings Institute points out in a December, 2015, Broadband Adoption Rates and Gaps in U.S. Metropolitan Areas report, there is wide disparity when you look at a sub-national level and based on demographics like income. 67% of those making under $50,000 a year have broadband. The number tumbles to 46% for those making under $20,000 a year.
“Individuals without private internet subscriptions or digital skills are at a disadvantage when it comes to access economic opportunity,” noted the Brookings report.
Population density also plays a role in the dispersal of technology and, possibly, ideas. With some notable exceptions, Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, much of the low-population heartland voted for Trump.
"Tech diffusion tends to happen faster when people are packed most closely together,” said McGrath. She likened it to a dorm room where one occupant gets a new iPhone 7, a fact that soon inspires her roommate to do the same.
She contends that people in poorer, less technology-infused areas share many of the same socio-economic problems. And while some may live in areas where it’s hard to congregate face-to-face to commiserate about the nation’s and their own problems, they have no trouble finding like-minded people on social media, which is, of course, quite adept at reinforcing and, possibly, spreading dissatisfaction.
Left behind
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Technology was supposed to be benevolent force that spread rapidly and lifted us all up together. However, at the start of the information revolution, policy makers worried openly about those who might get left behind.
In the waning months of his administration, President Bill Clinton held an open and remarkably casual forum at the White House, the Conference on the New Economy Agenda. As The New Yorker's George Packer notes in his brilliant essay, Hillary Clinton and the Populist Revolt, Clinton was, at the time, enthusiastic about the potential for the Internet to change American lives, “I believe the computer and the Internet give us a chance to move more people out of poverty more quickly than at any time in all human history.”
When I dug up Bill Clinton’s original opening remarks, though, it was something else he said that struck me: “How do we keep this expansion going? How do we extend its benefits to those still left behind in its shadows? What could go wrong and how do we avoid it?”
Zheng Gao of Shanghi, China, photographs the front pages of newspapers on display outside the Newseum in Washington, the day after Donald Trump won the presidency.
Image: Susan Walsh, /File/AP
Those in academia were even more pointed in their concerns. The 1997 study "Information revolution: Impact of technology on global workforce" outlined a near future of automated production in agriculture and manufacturing. It warned: “The sweeping substitution of machines for workers is going to force every nation to rethink the role of human beings in the social process. Redefining the opportunities and responsibilities for millions of people in a society absent of mass formal employment is likely to be the single most pressing social issue of the coming century.”
The new economy essentially turned into a nightmare for U.S. brick and mortar retailers and those who worked for them. Well into 2016, the bleeding continues. Sears closed dozens of stores this year and nearly 40 Macy’s—many of them in malls where they serve as anchor stores—are also on the chopping block.
The loss of factory jobs surprised no one, but the assumption that information, "knowledge work," and a rapidly expanding eCommerce industry would absorb all these disenfranchised industrial, blue-collar and retail workers was misguided, at best.
Donald Trump and his campaign seemed to intuitively know that tech and innovation weren't necessarily positive terms in the heartland.
And they adjusted accordingly.
The right message
While Trump rode high on Twitter throughout the election, the president-elect’s campaign rarely addressed the technological bounty of the 21st century and how it can transform lives. His idea of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) expansion was that there didn't need to be any. When asked about expanding STEM programs, Trump said, “There are a host of STEM programs already in existence.”
What Trump did tell rural and deindustrialized America is that he was bringing back lost blue-collar jobs. Instead of technology, innovation and retraining for 21st century jobs, he promised to, more or less, return these places to their former, pre-tech revolution glory.
Trump was offering them a hand instead of a thumb drive. Technology wasn't the answer for these voters because it was, essentially, the villain—and its co-conspirator was the U.S. government, which, as McGrath sees it, failed to provide a social safety net for blue-color workers.
“In my view, we haven’t thought enough about ‘social adjustment cost analysis’ of this,” she told me.
The U.S. could, she added, take a lesson from Denmark, which embraces the changes wrought by the tech revolution (like factory shutdowns and relocations to other countries), but also thinks hard about how to ensure nobody gets left behind. “They pay you unemployment that lasts long enough for you to enroll in re-skilling program,” she said. They also find new industries and can leverage the capabilities of those left behind and even pay for relocation costs, she added.
What Trump and his team did was simply see what was already there. It was hidden in plain sight, like the tiny people only Horton hears in Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who. They were shouting, "We are here! We are here!." Trump’s team heard them and then crafted a campaign message, "Jobs, jobs and more jobs," that would have been just as at home almost a century ago in an America on the cusp of a devastating depression.
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