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Steve Bannon & Chris Arnade

Two very different men lament that Dems and GOP have same basic view on trade and economic policy
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From Robert Draper’s NYT Magazine story on Trump’s legislative agenda:

Up to this point, Ryan had epitomized to Bannon everything that was wrong with the Republican Party. Discussing the two parties’ shortcomings, Bannon later told me, “What’s that Dostoyevsky line: Happy families are all the same, but unhappy families are unhappy in their own unique ways?” (He meant Tolstoy.) “I think the Democrats are fundamentally afflicted with the inability to discuss and have an adult conversation about economics and jobs, because they’re too consumed by identity politics. And then the Republicans, it’s all this theoretical Cato Institute, Austrian economics, limited government — which just doesn’t have any depth to it. They’re not living in the real world.”

Bannon’s not wrong, you know. More:

As [Bannon] would later tell me: “The working class, and in particular the lower middle class, understands something that’s so obvious — which is that they’ve basically underwritten the rise of China. Their jobs, their raises, their retirement accounts have all fueled the private equity and venture capital that built China. Because China’s really built on investments and exports, right? People are smart enough to know that they’re getting played by both political parties. The two may be different on social issues, but when it comes to fundamental economics, they’re both the same. That’s why the American working class is interested in trade. It’s linked to their lives.”

Along those lines, check out these tweets from today by Chris Arnade, whose Twitter account you really should be following:

 

And then, a tweetstorm:

Read more and follow @chrisarnade here.

A Republican version of this would not be hard to come up with. I bet Steve Bannon  could come up with a Hurricane Katrina of a tweetstorm laying into the GOP like Chris Arnade lays into his own party here.

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