Anti free trade

Saving jobs

Saving industries

I mean, go listen to his campaign speeches:



And remember Michael Moore's retelling:



People liked Trump because he promised tariffs. I mean, people are morons and don't get why tariffs are bad, but they think it's going to help.

Yeah everyone was really flabbergasted how Trump beat 16 Republicans who all ran on destroying jobs and moving more jobs oversees. Which is to say: in supporting American industry and calling for more jobs, Trump was no different from any other candidate. Obviously, all the other candidates were making similar promises. So why did people take Trump more seriously? Isn't it, in large part, because he was an insurgent candidate? Could someone with Obama's restrained personality and Trump's ideas have won the Republican primaries in 2016? (Wouldn't that person look a little like Ben Carson?)

If I recall, Michael Moore's articulation of Trump pinned it primarily on sticking it to the elites, but it's been a while since I watched that clip.

That globalization is a strategic and economic blunder. The benefits of globalization are disproportionately realized by an extreme minority (what he calls coastal elites) and are a net loss for the vast majority of Americans. Globalization also causes the loss of domestic industry, which subjects America to the whims of foreign powers. The economy can be made to better suit the needs of the people by reducing globalization, via erecting barriers against international trade and human migration (sometimes physical ones).

Trump is effectively advocating for a return to a pre-Nixon economy. Something with historical precedent and something that, indeed, did work better for average people. Watch the second Blyth video I posted if you want to learn more about how siloed national economies used to work before globalization.

Unreservedly yes (despite the flippancy of your aside). The people who voted for Trump have real problems that Clinton et al. were visibly ignoring. Make fun of Trump for having stupid answers, by all means. But the people who voted for him voted despite his contemptible behavior, because he was at least talking about the problems of real people, while Clinton was dead silent on any issue that might inconvenience her rich friends (unless Sanders shamed her into talking about it).



Just to be clearer, I don't think cultural resentment matters at all. Not one bit. It's fuel for tribalism, a shibboleth for party affiliation, but it's not what gets you votes. Economics is the beginning and the end of it. The stuff of survival; the food, the house, the productive social bonds. That's what gets people to vote, even if they have to hold their nose to do it. As far as I'm concerned, all of this liberal hand-wringing about tone and likability and whatnot is a bunch of defensive gibberish to distract from the fact that the Democrats actually lost to Trump on substance.

Protectionism did represent a genuinely difference from other Republicans, but so did his view on immigration, which was the biggest concern of many Trump supporters. Plus, there's the isolationist tendency in his foreign policy as a candidate.

Look, I just don't think a person can say it was economics at the exclusion of cultural conflict or other factors. They're obviously interpenetrating concerns, and support for Trumpism was multi-faceted phenomenon that people were attracted to for diverse reasons. I mean sure some people just thought he was a breath of fresh air.

Really? All I can find of e.g. Ted Cruz is him talking endlessly about tax cuts:



Same from Marco Rubio:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4553003/senator-marco-rubio-economic-policy-address

They just talk about cutting taxes in anything I found..

I wasn't being flippant about the wall. It was his signature idea. I actually think it I think captures a lot of what was appealing about Trump's candidacy: its simple and easy to understand (if you don't actually get into any of the details, that is), it's resolute and an assertion of power, it defies a lot of liberal orthodoxies and do-goodery sensibilities on immigration, it sees the world as a place that's full of conflict and sees a demand for America to assert itself to protect itself and to protect the exclusive interests of Americans over and against the good of the international community, it's partially about a need to maintain America's current ethnic composition, it's partially about protecting American jobs... it's like so much with Trump (especially as a candidate, but still now). You can read into it whatever you want.

Jeb in 2015:



https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2015/07/06/jeb-bush-attacks-the-obama-clinton-zombie-economy/?utm_term=.1bf1b123f6ad

That sounds different from what Trump was saying to me

Evidently it matters to other people, whether or not it matters to you. Evidently people organize politically on the basis of identity, whether it's LGBT rights, Black Lives Matter, or Charlottesville. Economics can still be the source of people's problems even if they don't think about their problems economically.

how?

They're all trying to focus the blame in ways that channel traditional Republican talking points and skirt away from what people in their gut is true. Like Jeb blaming Obama for poverty, and Cruz and Rubio blaming taxes. Outside of a fringe few, people know it's bull**** to blame those things. Trump pointed at the same issues, but gave it a more likely and real cause.

Jeb was blaming Obama for slow economic recovery and poor job growth. How is that different from what Trump did?

Trump said he was going to do something different: stop foreigners from taking jobs and "fix bad trade deals". Theu were economic ideas, and economic ideas the establishment hated, and were simple and easy to follow narratives.

No other Republican would have said anything anti-NAFTA. And I think it's important to remember how unpopular NAFTA was with blue collar level American workers.

Holy **** you're a time vampire. Whatever, let's run down the list.

yooo this is taking foreve I'm excluding everybody who dropped out before the primaries started, because the people didn't get to pick them anyway.

• Jeb Bush: Economic liberal. Endorsed (along with five other frontrunners) by the Club for Growth on the basis of economic freedom. Anti-regulation, pro-subsidy, pro-free trade (expressed support for TPP and supported fast-tracking it before Obama left office). Ran on destroying jobs and moving more jobs overseas.
• Ben Carson: Economic liberal. Adhered to "Republican orthodoxy" on economic issues. Anti-regulation (other than financial regulations, which he supported late). Pro-free trade, except specifically the TPP (also opposed late). Ran on destroying jobs and moving more jobs overseas.
• Chris Christie: Economic liberal. Opposed to regulation. Strong supporter of free trade, including personal efforts to promote the TPP to foreign governments. Ran on destroying jobs and moving more jobs overseas.
• Ted Cruz: Economic liberal. Endorsed by Club for Growth. Strongly opposed to regulation. Strong supporter of free trade (including the TPP until Trump made it too unpopular). Ran on destroying jobs and moving more jobs overseas.
• Carly Fiorina: Economic liberal, professional customer-****er. Radically anti-regulation. Strong supporter of free trade (except the TPP). Ran on destroying jobs and moving more jobs overseas.
• Jim Gilmore: Economic liberal. Express supporter of "free market capitalism" (whatever that is), entrepreneurs and people who accumulate wealth. Not entirely sure what he thought about free trade, but I'm guessing he too ran on destroying jobs and moving more jobs overseas.
• Mike Huckabee: Weakly economic liberal. Supports fair trade, but not free trade. Anti-regulation unless your industry is unpopular today. Pro-subsidy. Anti-labor. Weirdo. Kinda like Graham, but not as extreme. Probably didn't run on destroying jobs and moving more jobs overseas, but didn't run on moving jobs back either.
• John Kasich: Economic liberal. Strongly anti-regulation, pro-subsidy, overwhelmingly pro-free trade. Soooo totally ran on destroying jobs and moving more jobs overseas.
• Rand Paul: Libertarian. Endorsed by Club for Growth. In accordance with libertarian prophecy, ran on performing the sacred rites at the secret altar of the ur-demon, the devourer of all domestic employment.
• Rick Perry: Economic liberal, not that he'd understand what either of those words mean. Opposed to regulation. Strongly supports free trade. Ran on destroying jobs and moving more jobs overseas.
• Marco Rubio: Economic liberal. Endorsed by Club for Growth. Opposed to regulation. Strongly supports free trade. Ran on destroying jobs and moving more jobs overseas.
• Rick Santorum: Hey, isn't that the guy named after a gay sex thing? Anyway, economic liberal. Opposed to regulation. Supported TPP (but argued it shouldn't be signed until after the election).
Ran on destroying jobs and moving more jobs overseas. And, presumably, whatever that gay sex thing he's always talking about.

• Scott Walker: Economic liberal. Endorsed by Club for Growth. Anti-regulation. Supports free trade, TPP, even trade fast track authority. Ran on destroying jobs and moving more jobs overseas.

(By the way, Lindsey Graham is a major weirdo. What is he even doing in the Republican Party?)

So, like, yeah. Other than Trump the field was pretty damn solidly neoliberal, with very few exceptions pro-trade, pro-globalization, and broadly pro-capital/pro-corporate. Trump was the stand-out candidate, economically speaking. Sure they all talked about jerbs and illegals and ****, but Trump was the only one offering an answer. People aren't so stupid they'll vote for the same liberal ******* selling the same ****ing liberal lie year after year after year. Trump actually talked about the problem. And it is the problem, it's obviously the problem. Job's gone, product's still on the shelves... someone's doing the job, so where'd it go? The free trade *******s stole it, that's where it went. And right there that's gonna rule out 13 of the 14 candidates.

The fact that he wasn't a six term politician with a pro-trade voting history probably helped, at least!

Probably not in 2016. Not because of his ideas, but because of the media. He would have been drowned out. But in a less crowded year, definitely.

Absolutely not.

Because he promised to put the screws to them financially.

https://www.citizen.org/documents/polling-memo-july-2011.pdf

Some of the polling in here I think is telling. Start with the bullet points. Trump said things in ways that tapped into the specific nuances of views expressed here that other Republicans did not: he blamed CEOs and trade deals, things which Americans are far more concerned about than partisan crap.

Free trade is actually good. Economists aren't wrong there. The problem is, free trade is always implemented in a way that picks winners and losers.. you can guess who wins and who loses, and so the changes arent as good for the middle class and increases anxiety and despair.

Yesss, he's an anti-globalist. That's what the term means.

Oh, absolutely, some people did. Like 14 year olds and Russian intelligence agents, for example.

Most voters didn't.

Come on, dude. Trump vs Clinton was won along hard economic opportunity lines.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/

Educated, creative and knowledge workers are the winners under globalism because they bring skills with no foreign substitute. Uneducated people are the great losers under globalism. They're the ones competing directly against foreign labor. This is the difference that jumps off the page. Not income, not ethnic conflict, or xenophobia, or religion, or culture by any measure that I can identify. The critical difference is how well the people in that district are prepared to compete in a global labor market.

The outcome is obviously a question of economics. Not the sole factor, but so significantly about economics that it's frankly not even worth talking about the other ones. They simply did not matter at all.

You were kinda being flippant. Trump ran on a comprehensive platform of anti-globalism and market protectionism. The wall is how an idiot tries to protect the American labor market against illegal immigration. Maybe it was his signature policy recommendation but it's hardly his only one.

A very, very, ridiculously tiny proportion of people organize politically at all, let alone by group identity.

Most don't give a ****. And even if they did, by definition most people are normal and normal people don't have groups to which they automatically belong.

Because Trump was blaming globalism for it.

lol.

So economists are "right" about trade being good. There's this whole idea of comparative advantage, where one country can produce a certain quantity of a good at a lower opportunity cost than the others can. Not that they can produce more, but that they're giving up the least in order to product that good instead of some other good. If every country focuses on the goods for which they have the lowest opportunity costs, then we end up with more goods overall (a bigger pile of stuff). This is obviously correct sometimes. Like Norway and Canada are probably better at producing lumber and drinking water than Saudi Arabia, for example. It makes a lot of sense if Canada focuses on bottling water and cutting down trees, and instead of trying to grow trees or dig water wells, Saudi Arabia focuses on what it's good at, religious persecution and terrorism.

Here's the thing, though. Comparative advantage obviously makes sense when you're talking about trade between individual firms; it's more cost effective for firms to specialize on one thing, and otherwise trade goods and services. This is the whole 'theory of the firm' thing I keep bringing up. But comparative advantage starts to get frayed the further you move it into the macro world. Countries aren't inherently better or worse at producing anything than any other country, obvious exceptions in the primary sector aside, which can almost always provide substitutes. National production possibility frontiers are these terribly complicated multifactor equations that incorporate all possible trade-offs, the most significant being national marginal diseconomies of scale. What that means is, a country has a lot of choice about what they can make. There's a global "pile of stuff" maximizing combination of stuff to make, and like any single firm a country also has economies of scale up to a certain level of production, and then diseconomies of scale above that amount. The opportunity cost is too high if you make too little of something and too much of something else, so instead you'll make efficient amounts of each. The net result is, no one country will ever truly focus on any one thing, or even any small number of things, but instead will produce an efficient amount of a lot of stuff. And no industry will ever concentrate in a single country, because their marginal costs of production will shoot through the roof. Instead, countries and industries will dither around a lot. Different countries might produce slightly more or less of one good than another does, per capita, but you won't see major differences because there aren't inherent differences in the ability of those people to add value.

In other words, if free trade is actually working, you wouldn't expect to see much free trade at all. Cultural and agricultural exchanges, for sure. Factors and value added goods, to a much lesser degree if at all.

So why's free trade happening today? What we call free trade is actually a tax-free arbitrage opportunity for the mega rich. And you did say that free trade is implemented in a way that picks winners and losers, and that's why it's so. But leaving it at that really ignores the reality of what free trade really is and what it should really look like.

Small scale, regional, cross-border trading (cf NAFTA's integrated supply chains) is an example of how this should work. Firms should be able to buy factors locally, and pay lower shipping costs, national borders be damned. Shipping injection molded toys from China, though? Or tee shirts from Malaysia? That's not how free trade should be working at all. In practice free trade is quite bad, and we can live quite comfortably without it.

Look, I don't disagree with any of this. In fact, it's worth highlighting how similar our views on this are: I'm with you that economic anxiety was the dominant contributing factor in Trump support. I'd even say it's the root of a lot of racial anxiety. I just think that, in addition, the economic gap is the basis of a cultural gap which divides the political and social outlook of cosmopolitan Americans who live in major coastal cities (the people who are largely the beneficiaries of globalization) and from the rest of the country. And that, among the reasons why Trump won, was that he was able to leverage those culturally cues to win over voters on style in addition to substance.

There's a reason why Democrats looked at Trump and saw vulgarity, and why his base looked at him and saw integrity. Part of Trump's appeal was that he used a language and described politics in a way that was appealing to a critical mass of Americans: he told a story about a conflict between a silent majority rooted in America's heartland -- real Americans -- and an unpatriotic ruling class of professionals, media elites, Hollywood elites, political elites and financial elites who are characterized by affluence, a smug sense of superiority and effeteness. His campaign wasn't directed solely against financial elites. If was directed against elites in general, and was largely based on tapping into a resentment against them: he won praise amongst his Republican base for blaming Republicans for the Iraq War, because many people see America's ruling class as dishonest incompetents who don't govern in the interests of the American people. Many of his attacks were directed at the political elite. To be honest, I'd be very interested to see a study that quantified the number of times Trump attacked the financial elite particularly and compared it to attacks on other elites. I expect he went after them less often. That was more Bernie's gig than Trump's.



I wasn't being flippant. I thought the wall was an effective synecdoche for Trump's policy proposals and many of the internal tensions they contained. Many of his suggestions were idiotic. It doesn't mean that people didn't find them appealing, or that they weren't powerful political symbols.



In effect, that was the answer I was trying to lead Reid to. Trump placed the critique of the economy in a larger, more conspiratorial context, of a global elite waging a war against a silent majority. It was part of a story he told about the United States. Americans who voted for Trump didn't on aggregate see Trump and Bernie as interchangeable candidates (apparently only 6% of Bernie supporters ended up voting for Trump). The way in which you're talking about Trump make it sound like they did. But they didn't, despite the fact that some of their policy ideas were similar, and similarly distinguished them from the rest of the field. Why weren't they seen as interchangeable candidates? Because Trump and Bernie told very different stories about the elites and their manipulations, and those stories taped into very different sources of resentment and hope that were compelling to different groups of people.

Trump may have blamed "globalism" for the problems of his base, and you may think that there's much about that critique that's reasonable and fair. I agree with you about that too. It's something that the media tried desperately to conceal during the 2016 campaign. That doesn't mean that a lot of Trump's rhetoric wasn't also unreasonable, or that it didn't have bigotry at its root. Many people caught on to the anti-semitic undertones of Trump's complaints about "globalism", and many in the media used it to smear him and to distract from what was serious and reasonable about his critique of American society/the international financial system. Sometimes they did that to distract from his substantive criticism of the economic status quo; it seems to me that they were even associating criticizing the status quo with anti-semitism. But the fact that the media was so cynical doesn't that also mean that some Americans weren't also drawn to it Trump's rhetoric precisely because of its anti-semitic undertones (and other bigotry).

I’m definitely not excusing Trump’s rhetoric or even his conclusions. Trump’s antisemitism, anti-intellectualism, and sexism all did attract various kinds of evil people to him. Evidence indicates, however, that there just weren’t all that many of those kinds of people.

The difference between Sanders and Trump is a perceptional one, I agree. It’s not just a rhetorical difference though. Sanders ran an anti-globalist campaign that viewed capital as the architect of America’s problems; the suggested remedy was to force capital to share its gains with the people. Trump ran an anti-globalist campaign that viewed government as the architect of America’s problems; his suggested remedy was to rule out the policies that encouraged capital to hoard its gains in the first place. Both campaigns nailed on the same shared complaint, but the difference between the interpretation of the problem and the suggested remedy is not a subtle one.

Trump wasn’t just the “racist Sanders”. Putting it into other terms, Sanders was the proletariat populist, and Trump was the petit borgeousie populist. They attract different people because those people see their economic needs very differently, because one is class conscious and the other is not. The dispute between these groups is ageless.

Is there anybody in the WH who doesn't see themselves as in a "temporary position"?

https://nytimes.com/2018/03/10/us/politics/trump-mueller-flood.html

Trump maybe

****

Historically bourgeois populism is the more dangerous one, too.

Cleaning the McDonald's playpen is a ****ty job

lmao good one jon

****

rite tho?

We have come so far. Can you imagine John D. Rockefeller and the struggle he must have had trying to heat hotpockets?

I guess Steven Pinker is right

This is a quote of Navarro on his role as Trump's economics adviser.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-role-of-luck-in-life-success-is-far-greater-than-we-realized/

Looks like some dudes created a model and confirmed: luck is super important and "meritocratic" funding is inefficient.

That makes sense, but, if it's true, I also don't think that that the racist, xenophobic elements of Trump's worldview are merely incidental to it. If, as you say, one of the key distinguishing features of these two classes is that the proletariat is class conscious while the petite bourgeoisie isn't, it strikes me that something that also distinguishes them is that the proletariat's class consciousness makes it aware that it is at war with the capitalist class, while the petite bourgeoisie's lack of class consciousness makes it unaware of the hostility that exists between it and the capitalist class. For that reason, while the proletariat is aware of who its enemy is and who to blame for its problems, the petite bourgeoisie is a class in search of an explanation for its problems. That's what leaves room for charismatic leaders to come in, and to channel its grievances by telling a story about why hardships are falling on the petite bourgeoisie, and to pin those hardships on an out-group, such as immigrants or Jews. So the scapegoating isn't incidental: in the absence of real class consciousness, it's a story that the petite bourgeoisie can mobilize around.



Yeah, I don't think I completely agree with this, because I don't think that it's so easy to disassociate, for example, antisemitism, or anti-immigration sentiment, from economic discontent. I think one of the reasons why people become anti-Semitic in the first place is because the myth of a Jewish global conspiracy provides a compelling explanation for why they suffer economic hardships. I don't see anti-Semitism (at least a certain form of it), as an implacable and unexplainable hatred, but rather as an emotionally powerful theory -- one which, for many, is weirdly irresistible, which is why it's perfectly fair to call it a disease of the mind -- that becomes especially widespread during periods of economic stress. So too, appealing to anti-immigration sentiment is just to tell a group of people who are suffering financially a compelling story about the cause of their problems.

I'm genuinely curious what evidence you have, and I'm not being facetious. I've come across countless pieces like this one that claim a preponderance of studies show that racism fueled the economic discontent, and not other way around, but my instinct is to be skeptical.

This might sound callous, but yes, it's incidental. Petit bourgeoisie populism doesn't necessarily demand scapegoating. You could just as easily tackle their grievances without it, and even in the worst historical examples of right-wing populism the issues (and the solutions) are never about the persecuted out-group. Not really, anyway. It isn't like proletariat populism, in which some kind and amount of persecution is necessary by definition.

I agree in principle though. Petit bourgeoisie populism always goes to some super dark places, so there's probably something primal about that connection.



Did you read the papers?

e.g. from Schaffner et al



Vox linked this paper to support their claim that Donald Trump won because of racism. But look at this. Their own data shows that most people are generally not that racist or sexist - and that people skew towards being 'woke', not toward hostile racism or sexism. What the paper does say is that being super racist is a great predictor for voting for Trump. It does not say that voting for Trump is a great predictor for being super racist. There is a difference between these things.

Then you have something like:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/12/15/racial-resentment-is-why-41-percent-of-white-millennials-voted-for-trump-in-2016/?utm_term=.e6cc8a863415

Which, again, claims that Trump won because of racism. What did they actually prove, though? That being a racist white guy means you probably voted for Trump. And how many racist white guys are there in total? *mumble mumble*

These papers are probably fine work, in general, but the media is grossly misrepresenting what they mean. They're trying to study the causative relationship between racism and voting preferences, which is fine as long as you understand the limitations of their conclusions. The media clearly doesn't (and I'm not even convinced the authors of these papers understand it either. e.g. I seriously suspect the Schaffner paper overfit their models, "controlling" factors by adding them to a linear regression that they previously established correlate).

The only study I've seen that actually says what the media claims it's saying is Nate Silver's. That's the one I linked earlier.

I haven't looked into the studies myself, but it doesn't surprise me even a little that the media is misrepresenting a lot of the findings. Good to know that if I look into them I'll find a more nuanced story than the one told in those click-bait headlines.

Maybe, maybe not - to be clear, the study authors in the closure of that Vox link are all preoccupied with studying the relationship between racism and voting preferences, and I think they're all trying pretty hard to promote the same narrative that the media is. There is a more nuanced story but you probably need to know what you're doing in order to find it.

Like when that Schaffner paper handwaves over "controlling for" things like racism and sexism and economic anxiety, they found that the voting preference difference for college educated vs non-college educated whites was the same in 2016 as in 2012. But racism, sexism, economic anxiety, and education all correlate, so lol, you can't do that. Unless you have a stats background I wouldn't reasonably expect you'll pick up on that kind of problem. Even most practicing scientists don't understand the statistical methods they use every single day.

I might really be belaboring the point here, but... I just assume that the reason for this is that the petite bourgeoise, lacking class consciousness, doesn't have a basis upon which to build solidarity from within itself, so it has to create a sense of group membership and group solidarity derivatively, either based on some kind of historical connection (such as ethnicity, nationality or religion). The scapegoating doesn't necessarily happen out of a firm conviction that removing the scapegoat from the picture will solve their problem (although sometimes that conviction exists), but more importantly to define the in-group against an Other.

This petite bourgeoisie vs. proletariat populism idea is an interesting one, and it potentially answers a question that I've had that comes from watching Blyth's lecture. The question is: if left-wing and right-wing populists are both responding to the same economic circumstances, why do some people identify with the left and others with the right? What's the reason of the preference?

If you go with the shoehorn theory, for the sake of discussion, it'd be tempting to say that people have beliefs about social issues that don't rest on their beliefs economic issues, so the left-wing populist is a populist who, say, lives in a big city and is a cosmopolitan when it comes to social issues, but a "radical" when it comes to economic issues. And the right-winger has local, parochial attachments, which gives them a more nationalistic outlook, which they combine with a radical economic viewpoint. But that seems wrong, because, as you're suggesting, the way left-wing populists and right-wing populists parse their economic problems aren't the same.

It seems like one important difference that distinguishes the proletariat's economic perspective from that of the petite bourgeoisie is that the petite bourgeoisie doen't adopt a position of direct hostility with the capitalist class, because they see the boundary between themselves and the capitalists as being more porous. That is, they believe that upward mobility could one day make them part of the capitalist ruling class, and so they aren't as likely to blame capital for their problems and adopt a posture of direct confrontation. I mean, I take it that that is part of the reason why Trump's base wasn't bothered by the fact that he was a billionaire: because they believe that the current economic system could someday make them like him.

Heh, funny. I thought there might be something fishy about that. Is this another instance of multivariate analysis/overcrowding?

I didn't come up with this idea, I learned it from the Communist Manifesto. Like I said, this conflict is ageless. I suggest reading it if you haven't already. It will probably answer some more questions.

It's similar to one of the complaints I made about Jordan Peterson earlier in this thread.

Statistical models are predictive, not descriptive! If your variables are truly independent, you can use regression coefficients to talk about the contribution of one variable to the prediction. If your variables correlate, you can't.

This is why. Let's say you have this simple model for a Trump voter:

γ0 = β0 + β1(racist) + β2(uneducated)

If racist and uneducated don't correlate, you can use β1 and β2 to say how respectively significantly racism and education contribute toward voting for Trump (γ0).

But if education is itself a strong predictor for racism

racist = β3 + β4(uneducated)
let's say, for example, that β3 = 0.1 and β4 = 0.5

γ0 = β0 + β1(racist) + β2(uneducated) =
β0 + β1(0.1 + 0.5(uneducated)) + β2(uneducated) =
β0 + 0.1β1 + (0.5β1 + β2)(uneducated)

Which is itself a different model. If you fit this model, with constants M and C, say:

γ0 = C + M(uneducated)

then suddenly you're free to choose β1 and β2 to fit whatever narrative you want, so long as β0 + 0.1β1=C and 0.5β1 + β2=M for whatever constants M and C fit.

β0 = C - 0.1β1
β1 = 10C - 10β0
β1 = 2M - 2β2
β2 = M - 0.5β1

So, like, for example, if we want to make Trump voters look extra racist we can manipulate the model to say that education (β2) doesn't matter at all. Make β2=0:

β2 = 0
β1 = 2M
β0 = C - 0.2M

Tada. Now racism is the only thing that matters.

Or if you want to go the other direction, and say that Trump supporters aren't racist at all. Make β1=0:

β1 = 0
β0 = C
β2 = M

Yay. Racism has been erased from the world.

It's the same exact model, the same predictive power regardless of how you 'game' the coefficients. You're just able to interpret the model in wildly different ways. Note that you don't even need to do this on purpose, this kind of craziness will "just happen" depending on how you perform your computation. In computery terms, when your variables correlate you end up with unspecified behavior.


So yeah. This is why whenever you read a study, if someone draws conclusions based on those β1s and β2s, you should be extremely suspicious. Using this kind of model to show that racism and being uneducated together correlate with voting Trump is totally fine. But you can't use this kind of statistical method to determine which factor is more important.