Anand Giridharadas

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“He Harnessed Feelings That Long Predated His Candidacy”

December 14, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Donald Trump, who’s cheating on his third wife with a veal parm, doesn’t really want to win the Republican nomination, but he also doesn’t want to not win it. That would be a loss.

The most important matter at hand isn’t whether Beefsteak Charlie is really in it for good, but rather that he’s appealed to the worst of us, stoked vile hatred that will survive him. When Trump supporters tell you that they’re tired of being forced to be politically correct, what they really mean is they feel like they can’t say racist things without retribution anymore, something that once was possible.

Adding to the fury is the seismic financial and demographic shifts that the former white working class is enduring. That economic decline is the result of many factors, among them the tax codes instituted by those GOP pols who claimed to champion them. They’ve been let down, and now with Trump’s assistance they’ll let loose, and many who are not to blame will be blamed.

From Anand Giridharadas at the New York Times:

About half of Trump supporters in North Carolina and in New Hampshire want to “see the mosques in the country shut down.” In the North Carolina poll, only one-quarter of Trump supporters said they thought Islam should even be legal in the United States; 44 percent thought not.

This suggests that there is an enormous constituency favoring this set of (probably unconstitutional) ideas, despite the fact that they have been rejected by most of the American political class. Trump didn’t generate this constituency with a few brash statements. He harnessed feelings that long predated his candidacy — feelings of besiegement and alienation, of being silenced — and gave them an unprecedented respectability. Even if Trump leaves the stage by springtime, he has galvanized, gathered and given voice to all these Americans.

America is living through an era of dramatic changes: its demographics shifting, its middle class contracting, its institutions grappling with the pressures of the networked age. Trump isn’t winning those Americans who tend to experience this change as a tailwind. But he has enthralled millions who experience it as a headwind, and his relentless campaign against “political correctness” has given voice to their fears: about terrorism; about a country passing into new hands, with the attendant loss of privileges and certainties; about a democracy that will never solve problems if we cannot call radical Islam radical Islam. This anti-P.C. sentiment, so vital to Trump’s brand, is often minimized on the left as simple intolerance. But the longing for less-muzzled debates is to many on the right what campaign finance is to many on the left: the issue we must solve to be able to solve any other issue.

This is how Trumpism might outlast Trump — by gelling this anxiety and longing into a movement, by giving a new permission to question who is American, by redrawing the borders of respectable debate.•

 

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“It’s Called The Informal Economy, And In Much Of The World It Is Bigger Than The Formal One”

June 1, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Maybe it’s because I’m from a fringy, blue-collar background in NYC, but I’ve always been very familiar with the informal economy, people earning a few extra dollars selling loosies or trinkets or food, handing out betting cards for bookies and other stuff that may or may not be legal. Such low-level entrepreneurship is becoming more common in the West during these desperate times, with the help of digital tools. A succinct explanation of the informal economy by Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times:

“One of the differences between rich and poor countries is that in the latter, people seldom wait for the government to ‘create jobs.’

When times are hard, they buy packs of cigarettes and sell them as singles; they find houses to clean through cousins of a cousin; they rent out bedrooms to students; they stock up on cellphone credit and peddle sidewalk calls by the minute.

It’s called the informal economy, and in much of the world it is bigger than the formal one. But it has been pushed onto the sidelines in the West, the refuge of criminals and the poor, because of labor laws, taxes, health and safety regulations and the like, which emerged to protect workers and consumers from the market’s vicissitudes and companies’ whims.”

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“With Our Strengths And Our Minds And Spirit, We Gather, We Form And We Fashion”

May 15, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"Within this group is a quixotic band of soldering, laser-cutting, software-programming types who, defying all economic logic, contend that they can reverse America’s manufacturing slump." (Image by littleBits.)

Anand Giridharadas has a really good piece in the Sunday Times Magazine this week about littleBits founder Ayah Bdeir and the American culture of manufacturing things, in the wake of the credit-default swap scheme that made nothing and left us nearly bankrupt. An excerpt:

“If you lived in Detroit in 1961 and watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho at a drive-in, you might have caught a 30-minute trailer called ‘American Maker,’ sponsored by Chevrolet. ‘Of all things Americans are, we are makers,’ its narrator began, over footage of boys building sand castles. ‘With our strengths and our minds and spirit, we gather, we form and we fashion: makers and shapers and put-it-togetherers.’

Fifty years on, the American maker is in a bad way. Such is the state of American industry that waste paper is among the top 10 exports to China, behind nuclear equipment but far ahead of traditional mainstays like iron and steel. Manufacturing employment has fallen by a third in the last decade alone, with more than 40,000 factories shutting down. More Americans today are unemployed than are wage-earning ‘put-it-togetherers.’ But the American romance with making actual things is going through a resurgence. In recent years, a nationwide movement of do-it-yourself aficionados has embraced the self-made object. Within this group is a quixotic band of soldering, laser-cutting, software-programming types who, defying all economic logic, contend that they can reverse America’s manufacturing slump. America will make things again, they say, because Americans will make things — not just in factories but also in their own homes, and not because it’s artisanal or faddish but because it’s easier, better for the environment and more fun.”

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The 1961 “American Maker” trailer mentioned in the article:

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