[rayiner]

The snide answer would be America was "great back when it was okay to be racist, homophobic, and sexist." I think that characterization violates the principle of charity. People are upset about the decline of American exceptionalism. It's true that in the 60's we had all those bad things. But we were also indisputably the most prosperous and successful country on earth, with a broad and thriving middle class. People want that back.

And they aren't being offered what that from liberals. Democrats promise lots of free stuff from the government, paid for by taxing the rich more. Many people don't want that. They want the dignity of meaningful reasonably-paying work, not income redistribution. That's why they vote Republican (to the chagrin of Democrats who don't understand why they would vote against "their interests"). They believe that if we got rid of all these regulations and lowered taxes, jobs would come back and they could afford to be contributors to society instead of receiving benefits paid for by other people.

[itbeho]

I was visiting my home town recently and ran into a former neighbor that is a Trump supporter. His answer for "great again" was that when he was younger his entire family had middle class incomes and nobody that he recalled received direct government assistance. Now, he says about a third of his family can't get by without help from the government and he sees the increasing dependence as bad for the family and for the country.

[SomeCallMeTim]

Exactly, but Trump has made no proposal that would actually accomplish that kind of "great again." He (and Thiel) are actually examples of the ultra-rich who are taking extreme profits at the expense of workers, so why would putting him in charge of the country make it any better?

Also see my sibling comment here [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12150037

[_delirium]

Trump sort of has a gesture towards an answer, which is more or less: trade protectionism. The broad sketch of his argument is that free trade, or perhaps more specifically "bad trade deals", moved good blue-collar jobs overseas, and either ripping up the trade deals or renegotiating them will move the jobs back.

I personally am skeptical, but it's a pitch many people are open to. In my opinion protectionism isn't going to revive the American middle class and bring back millions of 1970s-type well-paying, unionized manufacturing jobs, because at this point it's difficult to create any kind of circumstances that will make that happen. Though I can believe a more historical version of the argument, that free-trade deals accelerated the decline of these jobs, which would've stuck around longer, rather than fleeing rapidly to Mexico and China, if we'd have had a more protectionist trade policy over the past few decades.

I can completely understand why people are willing to buy the argument though, in part because they're not being offered a particularly compelling alternative. Telling someone who used to have a good factory job and is now poor something like: "sorry buddy, these jobs are gone and not coming back, maybe go to university or sign up for welfare", isn't a big winner. But, I doubt this is what interests Thiel.

[SomeCallMeTim]

>trade protectionism

Seems like that is the kind of thing that gets you into trade wars. Not to mention that people would be Really Really Unhappy if iPhones suddenly doubled in price because of tariffs designed to protect American manufacturing.

But...I'm not an expert, so I don't know with any degree of confidence what the consequences would be. Problem is Trump's fans are so far down in the "not an expert" direction that Dunning-Kruger probably makes them think it really IS that easy...sigh...

[erichocean]

> Unhappy if iPhones suddenly doubled in price

Pretty sure I remember Apple saying it would cost a whopping $7 more per device to build an iPhone in the US. The real problem is that the US lacks a wealth of (low cost?) suppliers for the various parts in the phone itself, so it would be difficult to innovate at the pace Apple wants to move at.

(The example given IIRC was a change in the case or screws or something at the last moment demanded by S. Jobs that Apple believed couldn't be implemented quickly enough in the US.)

[SomeCallMeTim]

Problem is that the extreme rich (like Thiel) are the ones who are benefiting from the current situation, and deregulation/reduced taxation will just amplify the problem.

The core cause being that individual humans are much more productive now. We just don't need as many people working.

>They want the dignity of meaningful reasonably-paying work, not income redistribution.

About the only way to accomplish reasonably-paying work is to legislate it. WalMart employees make so little a substantial fraction (possibly 15% in one state) are on food stamps. [1] Minimum wage needs to be livable.

But as you push up minimum wage a lot of employers will cut back on how many people they hire. They certainly won't rehire the 5M+ people who have lost manufacturing jobs due to outsourcing and automation: Even the manufacturing jobs that are returning to the US are only hiring 1/10 or fewer the number of workers, and those need to be experts and managing robots. So if you have people who want jobs (and not, for instance, a guaranteed income), the government is going to need to be the employer of last resort. And I don't see Trump creating a New Deal.

The laughable situation is that Trump is known most for cheating companies and workers for his own benefit. He's in this for his ego and for selfish gains. Looking at the evidence, at best one can hope that Trump will break the country so badly that something better will rise from the ashes. And it's immoral to push for such a disaster for someone like Thiel who isn't likely to be one of the ones who suffer from the disaster. The ends don't justify the means.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/04/walm...

[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/world-wi...

[Malician]

It feels like they are hankering for a period of post-WWII prosperity caused by the decimation of the remainder of the developed world & great demand for American manufacturing, by a restricted labor market for women and minorities in higher end jobs and positions, and the need for lots of bodies in relatively high paying positions due to an absence of automation.

None of these things are coming back - I feel like they are yearning for a dream because they don't know why that dream existed.

Scott Sumner on steel jobs: http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=31847