Almost no one was predicting that Donald Trump was going to win the presidential election in the United States. Most commentators that I listened to were fairly confident that although the race was fairly tight, that Kamela Harris was going to pull ahead and win. People like James Carville and Michael Moore. But in the end, the bonds of the zombie followers to their cult leader prevailed.
And now, people are coming up with all sorts of reasons as to why the election turned out exactly the way that it did. Biden waited too long before he dropped out. Harris wasn’t a very good candidate to begin with, someone who had been rejected by the voters in the presidential primaries in 2020. The Democratic party has become a party for the intellectual elites, and it’s out of
touch with the average person. Harris should have picked Josh Shapiro to be the vice-presidential candidate instead of Tim Walz. The Democrats have ignored Latinos. They have ignored black men. The Democrats have been too slow to deal with the border crisis. They have been ineffectual in dealing with inflation. And let’s not forget the notion that the Biden administration hasn’t done enough to put an end to the Gaza crisis.
All of these accusations have to do with political strategy or policy. If only the Democrats attitudes about things relating to the campaign had been different, they would have been able to convince more undecided voters and more voters from the other side to come over and vote for Harris. But the truth is that there is nothing that the Democrats could have done to change the mind of a true Trumpster. Trump himself has changed his mind suddenly on many issues. As a matter of fact, the Trumpsters unconsciously love it when he changes his mind about something, because it acts as another shock to their systems to momentarily pull them out of their numbness.
But for the sake of discussion, I’m going to focus on one issue that has been the foundation for one of the major explanations as to why Harris lost. I’m talking about inflation. Many people blame Biden for the incredible growth of inflation during his term, and the fact that he and the federal reserve have since brought the rate of inflation down dramatically has still left the high prices that were the result of the great inflation where they were.
The problem with this line of blame game thinking is that it assumes that presidents have control over every piece of misfortune that befalls a country. The truth is that inflation ran rampant in the whole world during Covid, because economies slowed down dramatically, as many of us got ill and the rest of us withdrew from human contact out of fear of getting ill. Many people were hurt economically during the Covid pandemic, and, as a result, Biden dispensed a lot of stimulus checks to needy people. With the sudden influx of all this money in the American economy, it was the traditional economic situation of too much money chasing the same relatively fixed amount of goods. Hence, inflation. But would the U.S. have been better off if no stimulus checks had been distributed? I hardly think so. Those stimulus payments kept millions of Americans economically afloat.
Now actually there was another aspect of the Covid pandemic that contributed to the high inflation. During Covid, there wasn’t a relatively fixed amount of goods present in the economy. As more and more sailors and workers in the ports contracted Covid, supply chains all over the world were disrupted, and a scarcity of goods was the result. So, with an artificial increase in the money supply and an unusual scarcity of goods, it was inevitable that a high inflation was going to be the result. The only major contribution of Biden and the American government to the high inflation in the U.S. was the stimulus payments, and this not only kept millions of Americans afloat, but the whole American economy as well. And, if anything, by encouraging the development of vaccines and the dissemination of them among the populace, Biden was doing something very important for the health of the country so that the people could bounce back from the effects of the pandemic and by extension the effects of the high inflation more quickly.
In general, it seems to me that people have become more demanding in terms of what they expect their government to do. To have a demanding posture is a good way to intermittently pull out of the numbness and the experiential vacuum in which people feel so deeply immersed today. Biden has done an absolutely terrific job in assessing both the short-term needs and the long-term needs of the American people and then formulating effective solutions for them. But no human leader, however well-meaning, can ever solve all the major problems his people faces.
But this is what the American people expect now from more and more of their leaders, now that they, the American people, are sinking deeper and deeper into their experiential numbness. So, more and more people, out of desperation, swung over to Trump, if nothing else, to have him shock them out of their numbness periodically.
© 2024 Laurence Mesirow
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