Well in 2016, to talk about de-industrialization would have helped the designated "outsider" candidates, despite the fact that one of those, Bernie Sanders, was not Donald Trump.
Aren't both political parties equally culpable for the destruction?
A frank discussion about industrial policy would not inure to the benefit of any established political actor. It's a story of breathtaking incompetence, callousness, greed, and self-deception.
> Aren't both political parties equally culpable for the destruction?
Yes, they are, and in 2016, both political parties faced outsider candidates running surprisingly strong campaigns in their Presidential primaries on explicitly repudiating different aspects of neoliberalism, including deindustrialization.
But one of those candidates was Donald Trump, and it was much more important to point out what a rude, crude bastard he was, 24/7, than to discuss the issues of political economy raised by the outsider populists. The point was to crush them, to avoid anyone in the political sphere questioning deindustrialization and financialization.
Four years later, we know that trying to silence populism while also giving Trump, a populist, 24/7 earned-media coverage did not work. At the time, though, people expected it to work.
