Here's an article that makes some interesting observations, but doesn't give answers: Donald Trump, #MeToo, Facebook, And The Breakdown Of Institutional Power. Excerpt:
Trump constantly subverted the expectation of what a normal candidate would do (e.g., apologize for accusing Judge Curiel of bias based on his Mexican-American heritage) by never conceding any mistake. The idea generally is that campaigns, like corporations, are basically built to apologize, walk back, and/or preemptively manage expectations so that the minimum number of voters take offense at any given thing. Trump rejected that framework entirely, but stretched the understanding of what was normal so far that there was a sense (a flame that apparently burns eternal) that some objective, imagined hand of authority — the Republican Party or the RNC or the delegates at the convention — would step in. No one did, because the uneasy reality is that candidates and their own campaigns alone govern the candidate and campaign’s conduct. If you’re unafraid of the public’s distaste, there are a lot of places you can run with that. Basically: If a candidate says, well, listen, I’m doing this and you can’t stop me — maybe you actually can’t. Trump, then, is like some classical Greek, Shakespearean character sent to reveal that weakness in the system.
And here's an article that takes the analysis in the previous article deeper, and points to the needed corrective action: The Post-Physical Economy and the Rise of Trump.
This second article spells out the logic which brought us to where we are today. I'd like to quote the entire article here as it flows wonderfully, but I'll spare you and let you click on the link if interested. Here's a relatively brief excerpt:
It’s a ridiculous idea, but one that’s pervasive to the point of cliché: the key is education. But even if there is a chance that, in isolation, an enterprising young person could improve his or her situation by getting more degrees, it might well be that if everyone headed in that direction, the economy would collapse entirely. There just can’t be an economy where nothing physical gets done, because everyone is sitting in a cubicle somewhere, managing, or thinking, or coding, or writing emails, or staring blankly at Facebook...
The mainstream political left, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, put everything on this picture. It was Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s rallying cry in the 1990s: a bridge to the 21st century, a transformed IT America. With the technocratic vision comes a whole syndrome of positions: leaning on experts, relentlessly emphasizing science and technology, paying abject homage to software billionaires, creating a three-way circulation between Goldman Sachs, Harvard University, and the cabinet. Then Democrats wonder how they lost the blue-collar vote. If you think it’s in the interest of blue-collar people, for example union members, to help the Democratic Party transform the economy and the values of the culture in this way, you’re willfully blind, whatever government benefits you’re offering. I think it was much closer to their rational interest to vote for Trump.
One strategy for realizing this impossible vision of a post-physical economy might have been to promote all native-born Americans to service-providers or IT consultants while importing a workforce for practical matters such as agriculture, transportation, building, mowing lawns, and so on. There has been some of that; fundamentally, that’s where those 11 million undocumented people came from. But the basic move was to shift manufacturing and even to some extent agriculture to other countries. The only way to have something resembling a service or information economy, or a whole workforce of professionals and cubicle-dwellers, is to outsource physical reality more or less entirely...
We obviously will never be a planet of managers and code-writers, except as we verge on extinction. We’re still physical creatures in a physical environment.
We see something like Idiocracy at work already in society. In that movie, humanity had moved to an overly automated society. Humans had built a lot of great machines, but we couldn't maintain them properly. The result was a mess. Who among us has not marveled at the stupidity of our automated telephone customer services systems? Occasionally, automation is a mistake. In my opinion, the rush to automonous vehicles is in the same vein. They won't work well enough to be worth the expense and frustration. The autonomy and purpose we experience in controlling our vehicles may be more valuable than the time saved by very fallible robots.
At a larger level of abstraction, we can see the neoliberal Fallacy of Composition at work. Just because it makes sense for individuals to strive for higher education and non-physical labor, doesn't mean that that is worthwhile and attainable goal for society at large. Rather than all becoming artists and computer programmers, perhaps society is better off with people doing physical work. Yes, physical work can be difficult and dangerous, but that doesn't mean that it is entirely inappropriate for humanity. Use technology to make the work safer and more enjoyable, not to eliminate it entirely. Driving is a good place to start.
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