If you tell someone watching their life, their family heritage, their community disappear..if you tell them that they simply can't fight it, do you think they'll listen? Is that human nature, is that a part of human evolution? To accept death or decline without a fight?
Understand - I *am* a member of the liberal class. I agree wholeheartedly that globalisation and automation are going to be utterly inevitable facets of future human existence. To me, it is as plain as day. And I believe from the bottom of my heart that globalisation has done a lot of good for the world - I have travelled to countries that were miserable and poverty-stricken just a generation ago, but where young people are now growing up with full bellies, an education, opportunities and hope for the future. Hope, that they can provide a better life for themselves, their children and their parents; all brought about because of the globalisation of commerce. I consider myself blessed to have lived in both the United Kingdom and Canada, two open, welcoming societies filled with good people who looked at me not as an alien minority, but as a human being, and rarely treated me differently because of my status as a visible ethnicity. That is also something I attribute to globalisation - it would have been a different story a century ago. Globalisation and automation are intrinsic facets of life both today and in the near future, and I'll defend them with my dying breath.
But they have their downsides - and they are truly terrible to witness. In the rust belt towns of rural America, people have had *everything* taken from them - their chance at a livelihood was taken by the companies who sent their jobs overseas and shuttered the rusted factories that now blight the crumbling urban landscape that signifies every run-down American highway town. Their communities were destroyed by the socioeconomic forces that forced those that could to move away, and doomed the rest to stagnation and decay amid the buzzing neon motel signs, foreclosed houses and rusted telephone poles that signify the death of the American dream. Their family members and friends were lost to addiction, disease and death as an uncaring polity looked the other way. Their self-worth was stolen by being forced into government dependency that was then derided as undeserved welfare for losers who couldn't or wouldn't get ahead. And, finally, their status as empathetic human beings was stolen by a cafe-sipping urban elite that branded them racists and backwoods savages when they dared to voice their concerns about the crumbling of their way of life, and the loss of their status as participants in the American story to immigrants, offshoring and the urban ideal of globalized wealth for some, grinding poverty for others.
When you go up to a man who is watching all those downsides, and tell him that it's useless to fight it...do you think he'll listen?
The same story that caused what happened today happened in post-industrial Britain - in the north, in former coal towns and manufacturing hubs, now entering a third generation of dependency and joblessness. And it will happen in post-industrial towns across the West as globalisation and automation take further hold. The people left behind by the course that we're on as a species won't sit back and die while being labelled racists and backwards macarons for daring to disagree with the zeitgeist of globalisation and automation - to them, it's better to fight and burn down the system if they can't win, because at least they'll ensure that those that took their lives away lose as well. This is what happened in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan. This is what will happen elsewhere as well. The horrible racism, the anti-immigrant backlash - these are symptoms. The cause is the struggle that these people are now undertaking.
It might be too late to stop this happening, but it is incumbent upon urban liberals to realise what they are up against - because they've lost their way. When they should have been prioritising reaching out to these people, fighting for those in power to provide solutions to these problems, fighting for *real* causes that involve everyone in the crumbling working and middle classes standing up to these processes and saying 'enough - either you provide for those of us left behind, *all of us*, or we try to put an end to this'...they instead focused on calling these people racists, sexists, misogynists, xenophobes, Nazis and whatever else sprang to mind. They did not advocate for possible solutions to the issues created by globalisation and automation - solutions ranging from a basic income (as
@r-u-s-x pointed out) for all to new infrastructural and retraining programs on scales that dwarf anything proposed by the fearful political class, afraid as they were of upsetting their donors and the wealthy by levying more taxes on them. Instead, they retreated into gender politics and identity politics, and used these noble pursuits as weapons against the very people whom they should have been out fighting for. In short, they created a liberal urban bubble of accepted social norms, and accused everyone outside of it of being a horrible person, and trusted, incredibly, that this would solve the growing problems of the day.
It did not. The media, and the chattering classes, must realise it by now. Because if they haven't, well, they have many, many more shocks coming.
you made a comment with no basis of truth so you should expect someone to jump in 
