The Democratic Party is still the party of labor unions, including manufacturing unions. The Republican party is still the party of corporate interests. Yes, Clinton signed NAFTA. But it was the Republican Congress who fast-tracked it; indeed, it was for NAFTA that Republicans devised the the fast-track treaty implementation mechanism. This was the time of the Republican Revolution ushered in by Newt Gingrich, who notably now counsels President-elect Trump on policy.

If you dislike Bill Clinton, it makes no sense to vote Republican. Bill Clinton, like Tony Blair, veered right in terms of economic policy. That's because the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions convinced people that the Tories/Republicans (representatives for the "job creators") were the only ones who understood economics and industry, and if you wanted to win an election you had to co-opt those ideologies.

The fact of the matter is that we've lost industry in this country because of _failed_ Anglo-American conservative economic theory (admittedly sometimes adopted in part by Democrats), and an anti-education ethos.

Germany and Austria have thriving heavy industry. And guess what, they also have thriving labor unions, ruling parties that are economically left of American politics, and sophisticated, often free post-secondary education programs--liberal, professional, and especially vocational. Which isn't to say they don't have problems, but manifestly they've done much better at retaining heavy industry, and they've done so using the exact opposite strategy of Anglo-American conservatives.

If you strip away the pretense, this election was absolutely about the racism, prejudice, and xenophobia of poor, conservative, and largely rural Americans. Are they sincerely and legitimately concerned about a loss of jobs? Yes, without a doubt.

But the politicians they elect and the cultural ethos they espouse are clearly a product of modern American identity politics, and modern American identity politics is a product of deep-seated bigotry and prejudice. There's no hiding that fact, or that it's at the heart of the matter.

And it's laughable to imply that because Bill Clinton voted for NAFTA, or because over the past two decades Democrats have shifted right, sometimes adopting Republican policies, that it makes sense to vote Republican. While Trump is a populist, his economic policies are generally quite conservative, the nativist angle notwithstanding. And in any event voters preserved Republican majorities in both the House and Senate. For the most part it's Congress that dictates national policy, not the President.

FWIW, I grew up in the rural South. In the 1990s a nearby small[er] town still regularly hung a noose outside the city limits with a sign telling blacks to keep out. My public high school history teacher literally spent a week instructing us on how the Civil War was about states' rights. (How the black students, nearly 1/3rd of the class, managed to sit quietly through it all I'll never understand, though I suppose keeping quiet is how you avoid conflict in such a thoroughly oppressive social context.) To this day, the racism and bigotry is barely hidden beneath the surface. While plenty of white Democrats in the North hold racist attitudes, they don't tend to adhere to the identity politics of whites elsewhere, even though they have the very same economic concerns. But the South is rising, and slowly creeping North.

And that's why the election turned out the way it did. The decline of industry has been happening for more than a generation. If anything industry is doing better than it was 10 years ago. Certainly the economy is doing better. Wages were finally rising for the working-class; many finally got healthcare. What explains this election isn't a concern about jobs; it's the increasing adoption of a bigoted, prejudiced narrative for a phenomenon that began decades ago, precipitated by the very same political class and ideology they continue to support with increasing vigor.