Whether you like him or not, President Donald J. Trump, at the least, will be one of the “lesser of two evils” you must choose between in 2020, and if the debates Wednesday were any indicator of where the opposition party is headed, Democrats are racing to second place, due primarily to two factors: first, their own stupidity, and secondly, artificial intelligence and automation.
Let’s start out with the first reason: stupidity.
Stupidity is a close relative of insanity, and we all know the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over again while expecting different results.”
In my lifetime, the Democrats have specialized in one thing: calling anybody who did not vote for them “racist.” They continually repeated it because it is effective in some camps and the fear of this label has driven politics in their favor for decades.
However, recently, a bigger issue has emerged. What people fear more than being called racist has engulfed much of the nation: automation and artificial intelligence.
I am not talking about fake Russian hackers, or leftist Facebook conspiracy theories, but the army of robots and artificial intelligence algorithms that are slowly replacing thousands of jobs per month throughout America, especially in key electoral states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2000, and Bloomberg predicts about 20 million jobs will be lost to artificial intelligence and automation by 2030.
You may think President Donald Trump’s criticisms of China, NAFTA, and the usefulness of tariffs are misguided, but they speak more to the heart of the average displaced worker in Michigan than Corey Booker’s latest accusation of racism or Beto O’Rourke’s most recent attempt to spout talking points in unintelligible Spanish.
While Kirsten Gillibrand was tweeting “The Future is Female …and Intersectional” to the “robots” in her district, which are neither female nor intersectional, she laughed as each one of them replaced 2.2 jobs in her poorest voting precincts.
Review the map of “jobs lost to automation” and cross reference it with the “electoral map of 2016” and you will see a direct correlation between manufacturing job loss and Trump’s electoral success.
This is where Democrats’ sense of underestimating the wise American voters comes back into play. They ignore James Carville’s and Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
They are totally unable to mention, let alone win, with a solid economic message that addresses job loss due to automation. The name-calling of “racist” is diluted as well, as it should be.
Unfortunately, it looks like they’re just going to keep up their farce of labels.
The debates proved that the party of the Democrats is more interested in the optics of non-citizen refugees, regardless of the billions of dollars in cost to working Americans, than our own multi-generational citizen families.
They have proven in their first round of debates that they will clap harder for Julian Castro demanding abortion rights to transgender women, than Tim Ryan claiming the Democratic Party needs to become “working class again.”
In the first debate of one-half of the Democrats’ candidates, among all 10 of them, America’s job rate since January 2017 and the historically low unemployment rate were never mentioned.
The Democrats fight over who can be more offended and aghast at social issues, while President Donald Trump will be promising and delivering on deeper economic issues, and win 2020 in a landslide.
Cardon Ellis is a Santa Clarita resident. “Right Here, Right Now” appears Saturdays and rotates among several local Republicans.
