Source: What Progressives Miss About Arms Sales – The Atlantic
Celebrating their success in retaining blue-collar jobs is one way Republicans are winning the votes of working-class Americans.
While the president was in Saudi Arabia, the Trump administration announced $110 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia—with an additional $240 billion committed over a 10-year period.
Selling U.S. arms to the Gulf states further ties them to U.S. interests by deepening cooperation and interoperability between the U.S. military and its Gulf partners. … Arms sales also drive down the cost of our own weapons and thus the amount of money U.S. tax-payers have to spend on defense instead of other priorities
while progressives might have moral qualms about companies that sell weapons, the roughly 1.2 million American voters who work in the aerospace and defense sector—together with the roughly 3.2 million Americans who support the sector indirectly—see little wrong with the sales that help ensure their livelihoods and provide a future for their children.
This might be another area in which progressive elites are out of touch with the voters they need to win back control of the Congress.