Disaffected Americans and Politics

University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales on Crony Capitalism
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/opinion/campaign-stops/donald-trump-crony-capitalist.html

An insightful piece from British journalist and political commentator Simon Heffer –

The American Berserk: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2016/03/american-berserk

“Automation threw millions of Americans out of manufacturing and into service industries, if they went into any work at all. The education system fails many of them. With 70 per cent still not holding a passport, their country remains one that understands less about the world than it ought, and learns few lessons from the rest of it. There are pockets of sweetness and light, yet much of America appears to be in a dark and recriminatory cul-de-sac. It sounded ridiculous for Hillary Clinton, on Super Tuesday, to call again for more “love and kindness” in America, but she had a point. It seems more the inclination of many Americans to look first for their enemies rather than their friends.

An American friend talked to me of his country having some sort of collective nervous breakdown. It is tempting to cite that to explain the rise of Donald Trump, but it would be wrong. Many Americans who would like him to win know exactly what they are doing, as do others who, in a different way, wish to break the system by choosing Bernie Sanders. There is a widespread view that the usual solutions will not suffice to put America back on track, and that without some degree of desperate measures the decline of America will become even steeper. The greatest fear of all seems to be fear of the future.”

Related:

Trump: The Great Orange-Haired Unintended Consequence by Marilynne Robinson (Pulitzer Prize winning American novelist) on the Trump Phenomenon (insightful analysis for the intelligent reader):

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/10/trump-the-great-orange-haired-unintended-consequence

“Trump and the others are the product of the souring of the party system. Someone should point out, in these days when the constitution is so constantly and pietistically invoked, that political parties are not mentioned in the constitution, and that the prescient founders warned emphatically against them for reasons that should be clear to us now.”