Opinion There’s something scarier than rising costs behind Trump’s victory
A broader dissatisfaction with liberal market democracy is churning up authoritarianism around the world.
Explaining the rise of Trump as a consequence of economic forces battering the working class is not a new approach. In 2016, we were told the culprit was globalization and the related “China shock” that destroyed 1 million or so manufacturing jobs. This analysis pegged generally pro-trade mainstream Democrats (and Republicans) as a gang of cosmopolitan elites uninterested in the fortunes of blue-collar Americans.
Just like today, this analysis misses the forest for the trees. Twice already, more or less half of American voters have elected a guy who promises to overthrow the liberal world order — to do away with democratic institutions, values, and norms, trample on human rights, blow up the economy — and to bend the nation, and the world, to his will.
While voters might be forgiven for 2016 on the grounds that they hadn’t fully understood what Trump was talking about, this year they knew well what they were doing.
The economic interpretation of voters’ embrace of Trump is suspect not just because it is so narrow. For all the polls demonstrating Americans’ grim assessment of the economy, consumers have kept up spending as if they have few worries in the world. For all the gripes about the cost of living, real wages for typical American workers have been rising faster than inflation.
And though voters were telling pollsters that the economy looked grim, all it took was an election for them to abruptly change their mind and develop a much more optimistic understanding of their prospects. Republicans immediately acquired a sparkling economic outlook; Democrats suddenly decided the economy sucked.
The idea that Democrats could have stopped Trump if only they had picked a candidate not entangled with the Biden administration’s economic record misses the point. Trump shifted the Overton window, allowing Americans to express profound hostility not only toward economic policymaking and its consequences but also toward the whole tapestry of modern society.
While identifying strands of voters’ discontent can be useful, the analysis must not miss sight of what Nov. 5 revealed about their broad-based disgust. To steer voters away from Trump’s “blow it all up” approach will require figuring out how to invite them into a country that feels alien to so many — a society that is continually changing to embrace new peoples, cultures and technologies, products, environmental constraints, languages, religions, forms of expression, gender identities, sexual affinities, and so on. Voters’ disgust might appear as though it is aimed at venal leaders out of touch with the salt of the earth. But it amounts to a rejection of what America is becoming.
This does of course include a deep economic dimension. A paper last year by economists from Princeton and Columbia argues that Democrats started losing the working class back in the 1970s, when they bought into the notion that the government should let market forces rip, dropping the New Deal approach of improving workers’ lot via strong unions, job guarantees, minimum wages and protectionism — and instead assisting the economy’s losers via taxes and transfers.
But the disgust has other strands. Take immigration. It is hardly nuts for Americans to recoil at the idea of hundreds of thousands of foreigners entering the country illegally. But the animosity toward migrants runs deeper, feeding on aging White voters’ fears of demographic decline that has enabled the “Great Replacement” narrative promoted by the likes of Tucker Carlson.
In a NORC survey in 2017 that focused on questions related to American identity, almost half of respondents said that illegal immigration amounted to a threat to “the American way of life.” Seventy-one percent of respondents to that poll said the United States was “losing its national identity.”
This unease extends to other dimensions, such as religion and sexuality. Overall, 52 percent of respondents to a poll last year by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution thought that America’s best days are behind it. Fifty-five percent, including three quarters of Republicans, said the country’s way of life has mostly changed for the worse since the 1950s.
Altogether, three-fourths of Americans today believe the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Fewer than one-third believe the country is a well-functioning democracy.
The idea that American voters expressed their economic malaise at the polls comes attached to a bolder claim: that Harris’s loss was merely part of a worldwide anti-incumbent fever caused by post-pandemic inflation. Voters everywhere, this story goes, revolted at the rising cost of living. But the relevant parallel with other countries is not merely about prices. It has to do with the broader dissatisfaction with liberal market democracy that is churning up authoritarianism around the world.
The challenge for the standard-bearers of capitalist liberal democracy is not to offer a better strategy against the vagaries of the economic cycle. It is to bring aboard the many citizens who reject where liberal market democracy has brought them. The challenge is urgent, because the other side is offering to end liberal democracy altogether.
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