IT'S THE STUPID ECONOMY, NOT THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Ever since James Carville rode to fame if not fortune by coining the mantra “The economy, stupid” as the guiding principle of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, the idea that somehow, a great economy was the key indicator of an incumbent’s prospects for re-election has taken a grip on all the constituent branches of American politics, especially jouralism and the punditocracy.
So why is Joe Biden polling so poorly?
By all broad measures the American economy is doing incredibly well. Biden’s policies have been responsible for a dramatic rebound from the Covid shock. Employment, the measure that I follow most closely, has basically returned to the Golden Age I write about in my other substack, History of a Calamity. This is from the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly report (November 2023)
“Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rate for teenagers (11.4 percent) edged down in November. The jobless rates for adult men (3.7 percent), adult women (3.1 percent), Whites (3.3 percent), Blacks (5.8 percent), Asians (3.5 percent), and Hispanics (4.6 percent) showed little or no change over the month.”
And just to add anecdotally: I was in the US in late April to make a documentary for the BBC called “Evangelical or Political Christianity?” My personal measure of the health of any economy is truck traffic. Driving from Chicago O’Hare through Indiana and Kentucky and back to Illinois on Interstates, US highways, and backroads, truck traffic was at boom time levels
So if it’s the economy, stupid, and the economy is great, why is Joe Biden’s approval rating so low? It can’t just be because he’s 81.
The theory I’ve been working on is this:
The media distortion of reality that has become a defining attribute of contemporary American society. People have voluntarily brainwashed themselves and this unmeasured sociological phenomenon has upended traditional measures of economic well-being as a guide to electoral intentions.
Full-employment, expanding gdp and a government stimulus package that has actually stimulated the economy after the pandemic mean nothing in the face of relentless negative propaganda from so-called “news” sources and “trusted” voices on social media.
But I find it hard to embrace this theory because I just hate to think that adults actually believe what they read on Twitter (not calling it X, sorry) or watch on youtube distributed channels.
Into this unhappy intellectual conundrum comes the Financial Times’ chief data reporter, John Burn-Murdoch. His weekly column, Data Points, takes a topic and combs through statistical analyses to explain or more sharply focus questions about current events. His column last week (Dec. 8), has re-oriented my theorizing.
Food poverty and other factors that create anxiety is not a number that is reflected in GDP or employment statistics so that might be a part of the explanation as to why Biden is not catching a following wind in his approval ratings. Maybe the economy isn’t as agreat as all that for a lot of people, stupid. But there is something else Burn-Murdoch has noticed.
In a study conducted by the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, people in the US and five peer countries were shown an article detailing inequality in their societies and then asked questions about the issue. One of the questions asked about redisribution of income as a way of tackling inequality. In all countries except the US this was accepted as a policy choice.
The article pointed me towards an explanation of Biden’s dilemma: the US does not have a social democratic ethos. It did once upon a time. In the forty year stretch from FDR taking office in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression through World War 2 up to the beginning of the Great Inflation that began with the Arab Oil Embargo in October 1973, America was broadly a social democratic society. Although a strong political survival instinct prevented New Deal Democrats and liberal Republicans from calling it that as using the “S” word in any form is a one-way ticket to political oblivion in the US.
Those decades are when Joe Biden came of age and he is still imbued with the New Deal’s social democratic ethos—as am I. But his appeals to that spirit of co-operation, e.g walking the UAW picket-line during this past autumn’s automobile workersstrike, may speak a lot less to voters than his image makers want to acknowledge:
In a lovely bit of arithmetical, even Biblical symmetry the last forty years have seen the replacement of the previous forty years of New Deal ethos with the Gospel of Reagan: government is the problem, its interventions in American life curtail your freedom. This view is reinforced by the media’s distortions (I can’t shake that part of my theory entirely, media really does play a role here).
Having laid out the research that shows how exceptional Americans’ attitudes to inequality are in comparison to other very rich countries, Burn-Murdoch closes his piece with a puzzled question:
“Are extreme wealth and extreme hardship, two sides of the same coin?”
I think I can help him with an answer: partially they are the two sides of the coin. In places like Indiana and Kentucky and everywhere the peculiarly American idea of “evangelical” protestant Christianity is strong, the individual is everything and the church community is the place to turn to in hard times, not the government. Government help is a form of “socialism” and socialism is “godless.” Don’t laugh. The “prosperity gospel” is a powerful force in the American heartland.
Underlying the prosperity gospel and more secular views of the individual in society is what I have identified as the Borges-ian analysis, something I discovered as an undergraduate when I first read the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges.
In his brilliant short story, The Lottery in Babylon, Borges, without intending to, lays out the essence of why unreformed American capitalism with its grotesque inequality and inefficiency in delivering a decent standard of living for ALL its citizens is embraced even by many who are its outcasts.
The story begins:
“Like all men of Babylon, I have been proconsul; like them all, a slave; I have also known omnipotence, opprobrium, incarceration.”
…
“I owe this almost monstrous variety to an institution that other republics do not know, or which works imperfectly or secretly in them: the lottery. Into its history I have not delved; I know that the sages cannot manage to agree; I know of its powerful aims what a man not versed in astrology can know of the moon. I am of a vertiginous country where the lottery is a principal part of reality: until this very day, I have thought as little of it as I have the conduct of the inscrutable gods or of my own heart.”
The story ends:
Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance.
Like Borges’ Babylon, The American Dream is sustained by a belief that today you are down but tomorrow you may not be. Sometimes hard work gets you to the top, but often it is blind luck. Being seen as the person who might take away your chance to be lucky may be part of what lies behind Biden’s unpopularity.
But I still can’t get away from the idea that self-brainwashing plays a role, and then there’s the whole MAGA subculture. But I’m not going into that now. There will be plenty of time in 2024 as Election Day approaches to explore that phenomenon.