My first clue that something was up was the Bernie Sanders rally I attended at the University of Michigan. Several thousand people (compared to the much smaller number who showed up for Hillary Clinton's rally in nearby Detroit around the same time) filled the Crisler Center. Not all of them were students; in fact, many of the students hadn't even been born in 1994 when NAFTA, one of Sanders' immediate targets for criticism, was passed. But many of the people I saw that day had driven hours from the conservative western side of the state to hear Sanders' populist message. They had lived with economic devastation (much of it caused by NAFTA and the Great Recession) and for many of them, the memory of the first pink-slip remains vivid. So it wasn't a surprise to me that Sanders won the Democratic primary and despite fivethirtyeight.com's predictions, I wasn't shocked that Donald Trump won Michigan.

In the Internet age, it's easy for those of us who never interact with blue-collar workers to ignore how seemingly simple things we do harm them in ways invisible to us. Journalists are as culpable as anyone. Despite our own industry's instability, we celebrate the disruptions of Uber, Airbnb and other apps that can lead to the loss of thousands of jobs, replacing them with precarious piecemeal work and leapfrogging over decades of progressive worker-protection legislation hard won by unions and community planning regulations meant to keep neighborhoods affordable for the working class.

It's easy now for journalists to engage in well-deserved self-flagellation for not having a better understanding of what happened in Michigan. But I wasn't the only one predicting Trump's strong performance here. The London Review of Books wrote on how Michigan's Democratic US Rep. Debbie Dingell had been warning Clinton she was bound to lose the state unless she did more to solidify her position. (She didn't, as we know now, declining to campaign in a "safe" state once she had won the nomination.) But this isn't just about failing to predict an election outcome. The Springsteen paradox speaks to an empathy gap that needs to be closed.

We need to understand how the things we celebrate, or simply accept as economically inevitable— from apps to cheap clothes, imported food and toiletries — hurt American workers by shipping once seemingly untouchable jobs to Canada and Mexico. If you doubt me, take a look at the label of your Colgate toothpaste and your Oreo cookies the next time you're at the grocery store. Living on the coasts, far from the center of American manufacturing, we might be blissfully unaware of these things, but the laid-off workers in the Midwest certainly are not.