RUTHFULLY YOURS

Americans invented the core high-technologies that enable the modern digital age, but they didn’t get a large share of the jobs created by these new industries. High-tech is dominated by Asia, where governments target its growth as vital to their economic development. The relationship between industry and the state is tight. In countries like China, Taiwan and South Korea, government-corporate partnerships provide patient capital, skilled workers and protection for intellectual property.

Their progress has been remarkable. Between 1999 and 2014, the World Bank reports, global exports of high-technology products (computers, aerospace, electrical machinery, pharmaceuticals and other “R&D intensive” products) rose by about 220%. China’s share of that soared to 26% from 3%. America’s fell to only 7% from 18%.

American innovations from the 1960s, the peak of the government’s commitment to defense and aerospace R&D, created the basis for a trillion-dollar electronics industry. Researchers with corporate and federal support invented the key components: microchips, lasers, LEDs, flat-panel displays, memory chips, imaging devices and solar-energy panels, among others. Today, these manufacturing industries employ millions of Asians but relatively few Americans.

Asia got the jobs because Asian governments set out to build innovative industries. They helped license the technology from the U.S., educated engineers and skilled workers, subsidized joint ventures with American firms that provided crucial experience, and underwrote new industries with grants and low-interest loans.

Solar energy is the latest example. As R&D made solar cells commercially viable, American venture capitalists poured money into startups. But Asian companies, with government support, moved into solar beginning around 2000. They bought German technology and by 2007 had cut market prices so low that American manufacturers couldn’t compete. When those kind of jobs move overseas, it’s largely a one-way trip. Since Asia produces most of the components, bringing solar-panel factories back to the U.S. would be difficult.

Hey Democrats, want help to rally the country around Donald Trump? Here’s a great idea: Have a crowd of wealthy, out-of-touch Manhattan liberals (who can afford $849 tickets to “Hamilton”) boo Vice President-elect Mike Pence while the cast of the Broadway show lectures him on diversity.

The Democratic Party’s alienation from the rest of America was on full display at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Friday night. And the left seems completely oblivious to how ridiculous it looks to the rest of the United States. Professors at Yale and Columbia universities and other elite schools postpone exams and cancel classes for students who could not deal with the election results. Kids in Washington schools cut class with tacit approval from administrators to march in protest of the results of a free and fair election. School officials in Montgomery County offer grief counselors to “help students process any concerns or feelings they have about the election.” (Funny, I don’t recall anyone canceling exams or offering my kids grief counselors when Barack Obama was elected).

People in the American heartland see all this, and they shake their heads in disgust. Today’s Democrats have become a party of coastal elites completely disconnected from the rest of America. Doubt it? Take a look at a county-by-county map of the 2016 presidential election. You can drive some 3,000 miles across the entire continental United States — from sea to shining sea — without driving through a single county that voted for Hillary Clinton.

[Trump thinks artists owe him respect. They don’t.]

At the national level, the Democratic Party has been wiped out. Trump won five states that voted for Obama twice — Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida — pushing Democrats even further toward the coastal peripheries. As a result, Republicans now control the House, the Senate, the White House, and (after President Trump picks a new justice to replace Antonin Scalia) there will be a restored conservative majority on the Supreme Court.