“There’s more to it. It’s not that simple.”
I say that to myself, despairingly, all too often while perusing the daily discourse between market participants.
My second (and final) employer used to remind me at regular intervals that it’s not necessary to “reinvent wheels” every day. Without getting into the specifics, suffice to say I’ve always been a thorough individual, and I demand the same from the rest of humanity. Life’s not amenable to summary treatment. You always need the backstory (the context), and as such, I’m always inclined to provide it. Usually up front. Hence my irremediable penchant for burying the lede.
With that in mind, I’m uncomfortable with the simplified narrative that says the odd juxtaposition between Joe Biden’s deplorable (ba dum tiss) approval ratings and record-low unemployment is explainable solely by inflation outcomes.
The figure above, which BofA’s Michael Hartnett recycled for the week’s edition of his popular “Flow Show” series, gives you a sense of how anomalous that combination (low unemployment and low approval) really is.
The lazy explanation (and my second boss was an example of a lazy workaholic, not always a contradiction in terms) goes like this: Voters hate inflation.
Lazy though it is, that explanation has a lot of merit. Voters do hate inflation. They hate it with a holy passion. But in the 2020s, there’s something Americans hate even worse than inflation: Each other.
We’re living through the most fractious domestic political environment in at least a generation. Our disdain for “the other side” manifests in increasingly cartoonish partisanship, one symptom of which is an inability to discern an objective, nonpartisan reality.
Biden’s abysmal approval ratings can’t be explained solely by inflation, and even if they could, the intensity of the disapprobation is indicative of a crisis that goes well beyond grocery bills and gas prices. Inflation, as universally despised as it is, doesn’t account for the personal hatred towards the left harbored by the GOP’s working-class, white constituents.
If you want to explain that hatred, you need the backstory, which in this case means you need to understand “The Great Divide,” as political scientist Ruy Teixeira and author John Judis described the socioeconomic chasm that opened up in America during the neoliberal era. And you need to understand how it set the stage for today’s domestic political environment which, more than anything else, is defined by hatred on both sides of the aisle.
Biden, despite being a (demonstrably white) champion for the working-class, is a lightning rod for hatred on the right, just as Trump’s a lightning rod for hatred on the left. The result is a kind of “F–k him and everything to do with him” attitude when it comes to polling. I don’t know any dedicated Democrat who’d rate Trump highly on anything, regardless of the merits, and the same’s true of Republicans and Biden. Simply put: Approval ratings reflect the hatred that permeates American society more than they do anything else.
In February, while interviewing the above-mentioned Teixeira, The New York Times‘s Ezra Klein said that over time, he’s “become more… skeptical of [the] policy feedback loops” he once believed in.
He was responding to Teixeira’s contention that “if Democrats could produce rising incomes and wages for most working-class voters for many, many years and transform the political economy of the US into something pretty different than what [working-class voters] experienced in the last several decades,” Democrats could “dominate a Republican Party whose economic policies are far less salubrious.”
Klein’s point was that Teixeira might be wrong about that. That the transmission mechanism between good policy and poll outcomes might be permanently impaired.
“I mean, Ezra, you almost sound a little nihilistic here,” Teixeira said. “It sort of doesn’t matter what people do. This policy feedback stuff is all a bunch of bunk,” he went on, caricaturing Klein’s assessment.
“I do sound a little bit nihilistic,” Klein shot back. “I wrote a book about political polarization and one of the striking things to me about the research is how difficult it is… to see in the data anywhere that a major policy has led to a major shift in voting patterns.”
Klein and Teixeira were, in a sense, talking past each other. For those of you who haven’t read the latest Monthly Letter, Teixeira penned The Emerging Democratic Majority, a 2002 volume widely regarded as one of the most important politico-demographic studies of the modern era. Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, his new volume with Judis, is a sequel of sorts, but it’s also an attempt to discern what happened to derail Democrats’ can’t-lose path to a durable majority coalition.
Teixeira’s explanation, in essence, says a decades-long neglect for the working-class finally came back to haunt Democrats when Donald Trump tapped into a vast store of latent disaffection just waiting to be mobilized and monetized as political seed capital for an expanded GOP coalition.
Teixeira’s right, of course. But so is Klein.
The disaffection sown among working-class voters over decades of economic marginalization and, more recently, perceived social marginalization, finally exploded in an angry populist uprising spearheaded by Trump. That groundswell came to be characterized by rhetoric and policy prescriptions viewed as noxious and wholly anathema to an increasingly elitist, college-educated Democratic coalition. And, so, the country was riven. Never the two sides will meet again. Unless it’s for a live-fire historical reenactment at Gettysburg. (I’m just joking. Hopefully.)
Yes, policy and the outcomes policy produces (in this context macroeconomic outcomes) matter. But after decades of bad outcomes for one group of people (under-educated, working-class voters) and much better outcomes for another group (college-educated, white-collar voters), the experiential ravine between the two is so stark and the associated resentment on one side so acute, that nothing, not even objectively better outcomes for the disadvantaged (which in this context might mean brisk wage growth both in nominal and real terms), is capable of changing anyone’s mind.
During his chat with Teixeira, Klein posed the following sarcastic thought experiment:
One way you might think of testing the thesis you have here is, what if Democrats elected a sort of president who was a throwback in important ways to the older Democratic Party? And that president’s economic philosophy was much less neoliberal than the party has traditionally been over the past 20 or 30 years, maybe a big return to industrial policy, a real focus on bringing back manufacturing jobs, a real focus on getting things built in the real world as opposed to using tax incentives to increase more digital activity.
That president is, of course, Biden. Klein’s point was that Democrats are doing precisely what Teixeira suggests they should do, and yet it doesn’t appear to be moving the needle in terms of support among working-class defectors.
Teixeira had a good response. “Well the proof is in the pudding, is it not?” he asked, rhetorically. “You can pass big bills. You can spend a lot of money. But at the end of the day, people will judge you and these policies by what they actually produce.”
For far too many working-class Americans, the bottom line (figuratively and literally) is that Biden’s efforts, well-meaning, genuine and ambitious though they may be, haven’t yet brought about the kind of sweeping changes in people’s day-to-day lives with the potential to override the pervasive hostility that defines the national zeitgeist.
Teixeira suspects it’s just a matter of keeping at it. “Neoliberalism, or whatever you want to call it, won’t be transformed in a day,” he told Klein, adding that “[To understand why] Democrats [haven’t] completely cleaned Republicans’ clock on the basis of their economic performance… we have to get back to some of the underlying trends that have affected working-class voters in the United States and how they’ve experienced their lives, and how their communities have evolved and the resentments they have about the various political parties and what they stand for.”
(As an aside, I should note that Teixeira and Judis assiduously avoid suggesting this is purely a white working-class phenomenon. While the data backs them up, I think we’d be obtuse not to acknowledge that a lot of the relevant disaffection does indeed sit with the white working-class specifically.)
I, for one, worry that Teixeira and Judis are actually too optimistic — that as concerned as they clearly are, they’re not concerned enough.
The perception of endemic, generational marginalization isn’t something that’s easily overcome, if it can be overcome at all. African Americans, other minority groups and women experienced just that kind of marginalization (and far worse) since the founding of the republic. They’re not over it yet, nor should they be.
Plainly — and notwithstanding what Marx might say about the existential evils of proletarian oppression — the white industrial working-class in America doesn’t have the same type of claim on marginalization as African Americans (who were slaves) and women (who were likewise kept as de facto property and disenfranchised, even if they were spared forced labor). But a lot hinges on expectations. And the white working-class experienced a dramatic divergence between their expectations and their actual economic experiences during the globalization era.
At the end of the day, I’m not sure this is resolvable. At least not anytime soon. I don’t think there’s anything Democrats can do to win back working-class defectors sympathetic to Trump’s populist message and I don’t think there’s anything Republicans can do to win back suburban, upper-middle-class defectors aghast at what they view as a hard turn towards a boorish, undemocratic platform where the risks increasingly outweigh the rewards.
Coming full circle, if you want to explain a given public opinion poll in 2024, you’re compelled to mention America’s perilously vindictive, hopelessly polarized, national mood. Even if it’s just in passing.
In the color accompanying the final read on University of Michigan sentiment for April, released on Friday, survey director Joanne Hsu noted that Republicans “posted notable declines in sentiment this month.” By contrast, Democrats and Independents “did not.”
At the risk of being completely obtuse, I can’t be the only one wondering why FDR 2 made the chart, but not 1, 3, or 4.
Wide angles aside, you’ve presented a fascinating perspective: both sides of a sympathetic (to a progressive) argument, both of which fail to explicate a convincing explanation for observed reality. It’s so symptomatic of contemporary left wing blind spots.
No mention of the panic over LGBTQ “groomers” and “recruiters” in the schools and Disney parks!!
I’ll take the bait. America had a large minority that were racist in 1861, and large minority that were racist in 1961. Someone who launched their campaign about a birth certificate and immigrant rapists is a lightning rod – and demagogues need anger and alternative facts, not reality.
So sure, let’s pretend it’s about economics… Observed reality is increasing inequality.
Don’t leave out resentment at reduced social standing for merely being Caucasian. Thus hostility to black and brown immigrants and black us citizens. Fanning hatred has been in the gop playbook since at least Nixon. And let’s give a shout out to fox News et al and the elimination of the fairness doctrine.
Both Presidential campaigns run 98% negative advertisements. Politics is polarizing business. To suggest the GOP started it is uninformed. Political anger is like Inflation. It hits a few items and then spreads everywhere. We are suppose to be mad, apparently. Add higher prices, taxes and global conflict on top of distrust and you have a raging dumpster fire… in a great country. Calm down. We will get through it.
for Biden and the country’s (imho) sake…hopefully Americans hate the farcical Supreme Court more than inflation this year…among many other things represented by Trump …
2024 … Beat the Bullies …
I find the vociferously anti-Biden crowd doubly perplexing because not only do they perceive no real improvements under Biden whatsoever, they imagine a functionally better, if not idyllic, existence under Trump when gas was cheaper and there was no racism. It’s hard to hold both those cards in the same hand.
Two topics that first grabbed my attention and made me a dedicated reader of your posts were your discussions about Albert Edwards’ ice-age and Aleksandar Kocic’s permanent state of exception theses. Feels like now that these concepts have finally loosened their grip on the financial markets, they have migrated to our political arena. I mean we’ve reached the point where wildly overpaying to keep bad sex with a porn star not secret and committing tax fraud in the process makes you more popular and even respected, even though the whole thing’s a hoax to begin with and said porn star is a disgusting liar. It’s hard to discern a reasonable takeaway from all these contradictions.
Might be interesting/dismaying to see how this trend toward feelings over facts feeds into our AI models.
I know you get sentiment such as the following often and I wish to state it anyway; if only for my own benefit: Thank you for putting into words what I know and think. If asked to write an essay on a like topic, I would fail to express myself in such succinct yet appropriately detailed exposition.
Rats. I thought the answer was “democracy.”
There are voters who won’t vote for Biden because they are in the Trump camp. And there are voters who won’t vote for Biden because they view him as a national embarrassment given his physical and mental feebleness. To which I hear 80 million people say, “and Trump is not an even bigger (and more dangerous) embarrassment”? To which 70 million people respond, “Don’t tell me what to think; I’ll vote for who I want to.”
To my mind, the main reason the democrats struggle is because they are viewed as unpatriotic elites on an apology tour for America, focused on a message that the purpose of government is to balance the scales to combat a corrupt and unjust “system”. Working people (including immigrants) love and want to love America (at least as a concept), and politicians on the left have denied the people the permission to love America. That unmet yearning, I think, helps explain why there’s a multi-ethnic coalition shifting to the GOP.
And it must be said, the democrats have shifted pretty dramatically to the left on social issues, if not in policy, then at least via pandering rhetoric. Just look back on Obama’s DNC speech in 2004 and again when he was running for president in 2008. He sounded like Tim Scott sounds today. Basically identical messaging about embracing hard work and freedom, strong borders, overcoming adversity, while looking out for each other and caring about “our fellow Americans”.
Most Americans don’t want to have a daily reckoning with our past that divides us into oppressor and the oppressed. It’s not 500 AD in Rome. It can still be early innings; no need to check the box score yet on who got screwed over on a relative basis, in the same century that we all hit the lottery. The only people who think the early 21st century is a time for a reckoning because the best days are behind us are coastal elites who can afford to indulge in liberal guilt, and college kids. So again, I think the coalition against Biden, in addition to the fringe cultural right and perhaps the Reagan crowd, is a growing coalition of people who 1) love America and want a politician who will give the people permission to love America again 2) don’t want to be told how to think and who to vote for.
“ The only people who think the early 21st century is a time for a reckoning because the best days are behind us…” Ah, isn’t this the whole raison d’etre of MAGA?
Yes totally agree. There is a growing chorus of people on both sides that think we’re too rotten to save. Different rationales but similar conclusion.
A couple of things here.
First, the original commenter (i.e., “thenucklives”) has a long history of abrasive comments. The saving grace is that his/her comments are generally well-reasoned, so I let them slide even though they sometimes veer off the tracks into inflammatory rhetoric for the sake of it. (Earlier this year, this commenter likened Joe Biden to Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to Alexei Navalny, for example.)
Second, I think we can go out on a limb and say African Americans and Native Americans got screwed. Slavery and genocide being inherently bad, and contradictory to the ideals (disingenuously) espoused by the founders. Disingenuously because many (most) of the Founders/Framers made it more than clear in their writings that in fact, they didn’t believe “all men” are created equal, only men who looked like them and, again, only men. That’s plain as day in some of their discourse, all of which is freely available to the public. Just go read it. In a lot of cases, these were not, in fact, the egalitarian crusaders we pretend they were.
Third, I wrote an academic, well-reasoned, balanced, less abrasive version of this person’s comment via the latest Monthly Letter. If you like the comment, but don’t love the commenter’s approach/tone, you can read the Monthly here: https://heisenbergreport.com/2024/03/31/the-divide/
It’s the founders’ rhetoric and the American myth that people yearn to love and embrace. Not their actions, deeds, and hypocrisies. You can even call it propaganda if you want. Whatever it is, it’s the secret sauce, and people want permission to be proud of it. Yes, including people who “got screwed”. There are millions of people crossing the border who would love to trade places with Americans who’ve had it the worst. We’ve gotten to the point where the flag itself is controversial. The first democrat who proudly sings the national anthem and waves the flag, without apology or qualification, will win 60% of the vote. And apologies if my comments are abrasive. I don’t mean for them to be.
Do you listen to yourself sometimes?
Native Americans (i.e., one of the groups who “got screwed”) don’t “yearn to love” the invasive species that murdered all their ancestors. Yeah, they’re “over it” in the sense that — you know — what’s the point now? The battle’s lost. But deep down, they hold a grudge. I can assure you they do. They’re certainly not thinking, “If only the Democrats would let me, I’d worship the flag that represents the genocide of my great, great, great grandparents.”
You also said this: “There are millions of people crossing the border who would love to trade places with Americans who’ve had it the worst.”
Keep in mind: The Americans “who’ve had it the worst” were kidnapped from one continent, shipped to another, kept in chains, branded like cattle and beaten with whips. If they tried to escape, they were tortured, shot, hung and sometimes all three. There are very few situations worse than that.
If you meant the Americans who’ve had the worst recently, your argument still doesn’t really resonate. Nobody wakes up in Latin America and thinks, “Today, I’m going to risk life and limb for the opportunity to be just as oppressed and miserable somewhere else.”
Sure, a lot of immigrants are in fact escaping from conditions that are objectively worse than the conditions which persist in, say, the Chicago-area projects. And yes, obviously a lot of immigrants want to give their children a chance to realize the “American dream” (whatever that means).
But implicit in what you’re saying is the patently ridiculous notion that oppression and poverty in America everywhere and always looks like paradise to people from poor or war-torn countries. It might seem like relative paradise for a month or so (e.g., “Wow, it sure is nice not to have to worry about a bomb falling through my roof while I sleep!” or e.g., “At least I have this faucet which, unless I’m in Flint, will prevent my children from dying of thirst.”), but ultimately, oppression and poverty are just oppression and poverty.
“People vote with their feet” I’d argue is the final word on how contemporaneous people feel about where their odds of escaping oppression are highest. Folks making the trip from central America know the difference between Oppression and oppression. I’ll grant you that 21st century Venezuelans would not want to trade places with 18th century African slaves. Any more than a 21st century homeless person would want to trade places with a 14th century king with the plague. That wasn’t the point I was making.
RE: Native Americans – I agree that they, as the descendents of conquered peoples, probably don’t have an impulse to wave the flag, any more than the Apaches would have an impulse to waive the flag of the Comanche. But I won’t grant that conquest is a uniquely American story. It is a truism of civilization building. Roses are red, violets are blue, and human groups succeed other human groups through violence and conquest. The only thing unique about America is that the rhetoric / propaganda that founded the nation is the basis for the subsequent movements that ended slavery and enfranchised the “average citizen”, a demographic that had been toiling for 10,000 years. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” A statement that no human society will ever live up to perfectly, but is the basis for why people come here, and why we should be given permission to have pride in our country and be hopeful for the future.
Knuckles – do you believe that patriotism was behind the boycotts of Bud Light and Disney theme parks?
Or even BLM?
It’s not simple racism, right?
Is the problem the loss of the number/percentage of Americans who are economically considered to be part of the middle class? Obviously, this decline leads to polarization- economically and socially.
For decades, moving more people living in the US into a middle class economic existence was not only a primary goal, but also the outcome of the Democratic Party’s policies. This no longer seems to be true.
This was the most recent analysis I could find. I would be interested to see this updated for the past few years- but I am guessing that the trend outlined (declining numbers of the middle class) in the attached article has been further exasperated in 2022-2024.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-american-middle-class-has-changed-in-the-past-five-decades/
A couple more things:
Most people hate and fear the intelligent and educated. Those folks know and understand things others can’t really confidently deny and those others sense the ones who know more are somehow superior and to be feared for their power. They would like to see smart, educated people disappeared, something the rising majority are bound to do by destroying our schools, banning books, and arming themselves to the hilt. Those about to rise to political power once more will close the gap this time around by ensuring everyone soon becomes equally ignorant. I had 12,000 college students in my classes in 40 years of teaching. No more than 10%, and usually less than 5% in any year would be students I could confidently hire in something more complex than a mom and pop business. Forty-five of my students did become full-time tenure track professors. (Yes, I kept track). An equal number, maybe even as many as 200 became solid millionaires and community leaders. That’s not going to be enough to save us in the future.
My mother hated two things when I was growing up. One was the idea that everyone had to be part of some kind of team which would decide their fate. Lord, she hated teams … and sports. In my day there were no organized sports until middle school and even those were very rare. The other thing she could not tolerate were people who lacked compassion, tolerance, charity, and forgiveness. She’s been dead for a bit more than a decade and she was so turned off by what she saw society had become, she decided to leave it voluntarily (in her 90s).
Much research shows quite clearly that the idea of compromise (a myth still perpetuated, but rarely practiced) is well and truly dead. Moreover, the more two (or multiple) sides who disagree try to get together and settle their differences, the father apart they will become.