This is ok and all, but the reality is that Trump would’ve won no matter what. Harris was an ok candidate who ran a decent campaign.
An amazing candidate with a flawless campaign would’ve still lost. When there is widespread discontent combined with a huge sectoral shift in the voting public, no campaign can overcome that. The only difference would’ve been that some other notional candidate better than Harris would’ve lost by a lesser margin.
People are looking for all these complex explanations for a simple event: the electorate was fed up with those in control and being lied to about inflation, and with their extremely short memories1 they lashed out at who holds the reins of power.
And we’re gonna see how that turns out.
Things which bugged the hell out of me:
1. Why do you think it is the average person recalls nothing at all that happened more than two years ago?
The financial news keeps acting as if nothing happened more than two years ago. Regular news, and any political content from talking heads kept acting like that too.
However the median person in the US is ~40 years old, too young to be having age related memory problems and too old to lack context for current events.
And it’s not just political. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect talking but I feel actively stupider when I consume news and that the average person is more mush brained than they were even four years ago. It’s like I’m getting a preview of what happens with long term lead consumption. I hope this isn’t your experience, because if it is I am so sorry.
2.Tiny thing:
The semantic word choice of repeating “inflation” over and over again that wasn’t immediately followed by “food costs and housing costs exploded” by anyone bugged me.
I get why finnews & politicians wouldn’t (the better to create absurd cause and effect chains with implied solutions or let people fill in the blanks that way) But you’d expect average joes to notice and say it that way, but nobody or very few people did (not in coverage anyways.) Yes it’s a subset of inflation, but name the thing. Name the actual most painful immediate thing.
For point 1, about why the average person doesn’t recall anything more than two years old, part of it is just the natural recency bias that affects everyone to some extent but just as much is the informational environment that only prioritizes what happened only in the very immediate past. And if anyone uses anything less current than that to make a point or as evidence, it is seen as nitpicking and “cheating.”
And this, I think, is new. Partially it relates to the fact that we just do not have public intellectuals any longer so there is no grounding of the debate. And another component is that journalism has been gutted (in some cases intentionally) by the likes of Google and Facebook so they could achieve information supremacy.
About point 2, economists deliberately have structured the measurement of inflation so that it in its most commonly-discussed indicators conceals the actual cost of living increases as the hoi polloi experience them. So that means if TVs and tablets get a lot cheaper, but food gets vastly more expensive, then it all balances out and “inflation isn’t that high.”
The Democrats spent nearly three years gaslighting people about their own lived experiences and that cost them (and everyone) quite a lot.
No Dem machine politician could credibly contradict this narrative because they’d be kicked out of the club quite quickly. The same for journalists. Any journo who didn’t follow along was branded “fringe” and either lost their job or just stopped getting assignments in that area.
And that’s even without covering the insanity and uselessness of “Owner’s Equivalent Rent,” which is how the wild increase in housing costs is concealed.
Dismissing evidence from more than two years ago as ‘cheating’ or ‘nitpicking’ makes advancing a dishonest policy argument easier — but it also seems like it’s covering up for brain damage. And I definitely consume far less news and pay far less attention to events than I did in the past.
The Democrats have gaslit people. But I also feel gaslit by larger economic discourse. It’s like everyone uses “economy” and “inflation” discourse to talk in code about things they can’t say plainly but even that is all muddled. A Unified Underpants Gnome Macroeconomic Theory would be more coherent than anything I’ve seen recently.
Ha, you’re right about the discourse seeming unhinged. It can’t be coherent because any analysis as a gestalt would point to massive changes being needed. And no one with any power wants the alterations required (no matter the political direction you think those should go) as that sort of change is dangerous to the status quo. So we plod along, walking into disaster with our heads down, contemplating the war over who should use which bathroom.