If they were poor their outlook was especially bleak. There just were no jobs for the unskilled, our president was admonishing us that many good paying jobs had fled overseas and weren't coming back and that we all needed to get used to this "new normal."
Then came 2016 and the election of a man whom Matthew Continetti describes in a column at the Washington Free Beacon this way:
He brags, he intimidates, he pouts, he jokes, he insults, he is purposefully ambiguous, and he leaves no criticism unanswered. He is unlike any postwar American president, though he shares some qualities with LBJ and Reagan. He is frenetic and polarizing, a showboat and a salesman. His methods are over-the-top, combative, and divisive.Yet he has done more to make the country stronger, to help the poor, and to offer a hopeful future to young people than any president before him, including Ronald Reagan. Wherever one looks - trade, judges, foreign policy, the economy, he is succeeding in doing what his predecessor also promised to do, i.e. fundamentally transform the country, but not in the way that President Obama had in mind.
In place of the politics of consensus he adopts the politics of confrontation. Where others mindlessly repeat politically correct clichés, Trump unequivocally challenges them. He has ushered in a new era of American politics by dissolving the varnish that for so long obscured fundamental cultural divisions between and within the parties. He is president of a country that is wilder, zanier, and more unpredictable than before.
Whereas Mr. Obama saw socialism as the future of the United States and did what he could to move us in that direction, Mr Trump is freeing markets to do what socialism can never do, create jobs and create opportunities for everyone to have a better life, including the poor.
Unemployment, both overall and for minorities, is at record lows, average family income is at record highs, the welfare rolls are shrinking and most college students can expect to find ample career opportunities awaiting them once they secure their diploma.
Mr. Trump has accomplished all this while being relentlessly hounded by a special prosecutor and a media which despises him and despite being opposed at every step by a Democratic party which perhaps sees their hold on the lower economic classes slipping from their grasp and their dreams of a burgeoning centralized government that has its fingers in every pie fading into oblivion.
Here are some of the ways Continetti sees President Trump transforming the country:
TRADE: Earlier this week, the Trump administration announced it had reached an agreement with both Mexico and Canada to revise and rebrand the North America Free Trade Agreement as the United States Mexico Canada Agreement. This announcement fulfills one of President Trump's key pledges on the campaign trail while benefiting constituencies in important states such as Michigan (autos) and Wisconsin and Minnesota (dairy). Trump also renegotiated the Korea Free Trade Agreement and has made progress with the Europeans as well as the Japanese.
ECONOMY: The Trump Bump continues, with overall unemployment at its lowest level since 1969. Consumer confidence is high, and data from the manufacturing and service sectors indicate continued growth. No president is responsible for the state of the American economy, but fiscal and regulatory policy help, and presidents take credit or receive blame in any event.
JUDGES: Judge Brett Kavanaugh's elevation to the Supreme Court will secure a five-vote majority of originalist and textualist judges on the high court for the first time in modern memory. Such a transformation of the federal judiciary has been a goal of Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan. The fact that it will be Donald J. Trump who will cement this victory is no small feat. On the contrary, it may turn out to be his greatest and longest-lasting achievement.
FOREIGN POLICY: President Trump is slowly and steadily re-orienting U.S. foreign policy to face the central challenge of the twenty-first century: the rise of China to great power status. Beginning with the national security strategy released at the end of 2017...Trump has accomplished the "pivot to Asia" that the Obama administration so often talked about. What the pivot looks like is a policy of containment—one that should have been pursued decades ago. Trump has made this move while sanctioning Russia, getting tough on Iran, ending the farcical Middle East "peace process," and attempting to defuse tensions on the Korean peninsula.
Mr. Trump is not without his faults, but what he has done for the workers of this country and for the future of our young people is unprecedented. Those who oppose him do so not because of his failures but because of his successes. They don't want to see capitalism succeed inasmuch as it'll make it that much harder for them to regain power and to implement the socialist policies they believe to be the only just economic system.
Nor do they want to see him succeed in appointing judges and Justices who will interpret the law rather than legislate from the bench because it's a lot easier for the left to get their way when they can do it through the courts rather than having to go through the people's representatives in the legislature.
No one has a crystal ball, of course, and the trajectory of the country could change overnight, especially if Mr. Trump's political opponents regain the House and Senate in November, but if you care about jobs, if you care about the poor, if you care about our young people's future, and if you care about the rule of law, you have to be gratified with the overall direction we're moving in today.