The Most Surprisingly Reassuring Thing I have Read about the U.S. Election
"Accomplishing grand plans takes patience, sustained leadership, and stability. Things that Trump was famously loathe to practice during his first Presidency."
I wanted to shared the most reassuring assessment I have yet read about Trump’s election, and certainly the only one that is remotely funny - The Unexpected Virtue Of Chaos, by James - who points out that Trump never actually delivered on any of his grand plans at all during his first term if they required any effort.
“While quite a few political laws don’t seem to apply to Trump (blowing a microphone on stage would usually end a normal person’s campaign), there are still immutable laws even in his universe.
The first law is that taking action requires the use of political capital. There are only a finite number of things an administration can focus on at any one time, and pushing forward an initiative will require the acquiescence of GOP lawmakers who will almost certainly be thinking of their fates in the 2026 elections. Trump isn’t an autocrat and he still needs to work within the factional politics of the GOP to get these things done.
The second law of politics that Trump is almost certainly not immune from is that accomplishing grand plans takes patience, sustained leadership, and stability. Things that Trump was famously loathe to practice during his first Presidency.
Now could this change? Sure it could. I could also wake up tomorrow without a metaphysical need to consume nicotine every 30 seconds.Going back to his first Presidency the only thing he actually accomplished was the Supreme Court Justices, and that was notable for the fact that it required almost no actual planning or consistency on his part. He just had to pick a name out of a hat and the Senate does the rest.
The rest of his administration veered wildly from attempting to buy Greenland, to pulling out of Syria (to then reverse that decision), to a summit with Kim Jong Un that went nowhere, to a wall that over four years had like 30 miles built, and a stop and start trade war with China that changed biweekly.
There are a million examples I could give here, but any single initiative that required a sincere commitment to accomplish wasn’t accomplished. The Trump WH was simply in too much of a state of constant chaos to ever get anything done.
Institutions do not just turn on a dime and start doing exactly what they want because you sent out a tweet at 3 am in the morning. Getting the machinery of government to work in the way you want it to—take for instance deporting 20 million people—requires having a unity of vision and energetic leadership to accomplish.
That’s simply not going to happen when your Chief of Staff is getting fired via Twitter because they pissed you off by having a different policy idea than you wanted. Systematically knifing every single person who has ever worked for you in the back may be how a reality show makes money, but it isn’t how a government functions."
Trump’s only success - which has had far-reaching results - was appointing people to the Supreme Court.
After the initial shock, I think people need to recognize that Harris ran an excellent campaign and did really well. Millions of votes are still being counted and Harris’ popular vote will keep climbing. The fact that is was a clear result does not make it a blowout. It wasn’t a landslide by any means. And there were unprecedented and vast interference in the election by Elon Musk and others. Money buys attention and moves votes, and there was an incredible amount of disinformation.
I fully understand the crushing dismay people feel. The outpouring of misogynistic abuse and racist abuse was relentless. There have been people in Michigan show up with Nazi flags outside a performance of Anne Frank. Nick Fuentes, a self-described White Nationalist and woman-hater, crowed that men had won, and that it would be “Your body, my choice, forever.”
There’s a German word to describe the feeling you get when you see influencers like Fuentes: backpfeifengesicht “a face badly in need of a fist”. His odious behaviour isn’t just one of the strongest ads for access to abortion ever created, it is one of the most powerful examples of how personality alone can enforce abstinence and guarantee celibacy.
When people talk about the “toxic masculinity” of the younger generation of men, really what they are talking about is people being complete and utter assholes, and following or looking up to “influencers” who are also assholes. They are creeps. Many are accused rapists. When people talk about traditional masculinity, this is not what “traditional” masculinity was in the 1970s was everywhere. People who talk all the time about warriors and veterans, well there were plenty veterans around from the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War. And none of them acted like this. There were still lots of middle class america that was liberal and square.
The attention economy of the internet has encouraged and incentivized specific kinds of behaviour, on social media, from annoying to horrific. It indulges people’s worst instincts by allowing people to continually shoot their mouths off from a keyboard in a way that, if repeated in a bar, would result in a fistfight, and in hockey would result in a bench-clearing brawl.
I say that because there a lot of what defines politics right now is taunting people with the threat of violence, and taking pleasure in people’s terrified reactions, and we are all feeling extistential dread, and we are all feeling a moral injury and a collapse in faith in our fellow human beings.
Everything feels like it is on the verge of collapse, but also that no one seems to take it seriously. Because we all feel it, but we all have different explanations for it.
There has been a back and forth culture war where each side believes the other’s culture will somehow wipe them out. And the reason we all believe this is because of the pandemic, which is also the cause of so much of our economic anxiety but also spiritual agony and moral injuries.
We need to consider what is the defining dividing line here, and the belief that part of the population essentially no longer cared whether others died or not. And many tens of thousands of people died in Canada and millions around the world, from covid. So, for people who believed that covid was real and deadly, and the people in the health care system - for them, the people who refused to get vaccinated, or who were breaking public health laws were putting other people’s lives at risk. We know there were many instances where people died because health authorities did nothing to get ready.
And for people who didn’t believe that covid was real, and that the vaccine had been designed to hurt them or sterilize them, as well as stories of injuries, also felt that people did not care whether they lived or died.
And we felt that at the very time that we had all had lost control over our lives, sometimes completely.
So I think that is actually something people need to recognize, because this is part of the sense of mutually aggravating persecution and threats that has continues to define the politics. And we need to recognize that, and quite frankly recognize how painful this has all been. We should, at least recognize that from the other’s perspective, we were acting like maniacs. And that is because it was a very high stress environment where one way or another, lives were at stake. That is, and was, incredibly hard for everyone to live through.
I think that unresolved conflict has only gotten worse because so many people are under monetary stress. People are starting to feel as the economy pinches them, that if we get rid of other people, it will mean more for me. But no one is giving the needed relief.
Because of the stakes, and the fear involved, the result is now that everyone is looking for someone to blame, which is really looking for people to punish.
Insight and learning are useful, and so is holding people to account. Punishing people is not, and all we have seen for years in polarization is an escalation of seeking to punish people, and, quite frankly, people deliberately trolling one another in order to raise the ire of their opponents.
People should also realize that most of Trump’s ideas won’t work and will be catastrophic for the economy if implemented. That includes tariffs, mass deportations and attempts to find $2-trillion in cuts to government spending by Elon Musk.
It’s notable how out-of-touch everyone is on what the result of $2-trillion in government cuts would be. All spending is someone’s income. That would reduce spending in the U.S. economy by $2-trillion, which is an ungodly sum of money.
People might be thinking “Well, if they cut $2-trillion in spending, that $2-trillion will go back to the people” or some such thing. This is not a matching, simultaneous cut of $2-trillion in spending, where that money will somehow go back to the people. They want to reduce spending to reduce the deficit. That means the plan is a $2-trillion cut of money that just not be flowing into the economy, at all.
That is an absolutely colossal economic impact. Because everyone and their dog wrongly believes that this money is “inflationary”, it doesn’t occur to people that they would be creating a $2-trillion hole in the economy. What would that look like?
This chart shows the median personal income in the U.S. It’s notable for many things, including the fact that incomes rose (due to low interest rates and a growing real estate and asset bubble) from 2016-2019, when they dropped. That dip, in 2019, is when Trump lost. It is also likely why Trump lost - even before the pandemic.
The pandemic response actually prevented a market meltdown by creating an even bigger one, and flooding the market with cheap debt that has created an enormous housing, asset, and crypto market, which has driven up the cost of extractive overhead to the entire economy - property, rent, insurance.
But since then, the median has been flat - but $300 a year lower than 2019.
This graph separates different income group - and what you can see is that the growth has largely been for the top 1%. The median and average are basically the same, but every people in the top 10%, top 5% and even top 1% saw an initial dip - while they are recovering, they are still worse off than they were a couple of years ago.
The median U.S. individual income in 2024 is about $50,000 ($50,200 to be exact). That means 50% of Americans make more, and 50% make less.
$2-trillion divided by $50,000 is 40,000,000 people. So, taking $2-trillion out of the economy, and being replaced with nothing, is the same as 40-million people making $50,000 a year losing their jobs, and $2-trillion that will not be flowing into the real economy.
It’s also the case that the biggest state recipients of federal transfers in the U.S. are not Democratic Blue states, but Republican Red ones. The pain would disproportionately be felt in republican states, and it would be acute. People will push back against it.
Even for people who are concerned about climate change can reflect on the latest Bizarro-world news, the CEO of Exxon Mobil has urged Trump not to withdraw from the Paris Agreement again.
The “drill baby drill” promise of trying to massively increase oil production in order to drop the price of oil means that the oil industry will be expected to produce more for less money. No one seems to have thought this through, including Canadian enthusiasts for Trump’s oil proposals, which is that his intention is to drop the price of the commodity that they are selling.
For oil companies, and especially their investors and bondholders, that lowers returns. You are quite literally asking people in private industry to invest more to increase production, which will drive down the price. Would consumers like this? Yes. Companies? No.
When Nobel Prize Winning Economists say “things will get worse” under Trump, people might well ask what these Nobel Prize Winning Economists are doing right now to improve their life. The answer is not much, because they are misreading the economy as well.
People need to recognize the economy really is troubled, - but it’s not showing up in the usual indicators, because those indicators miss economically and politically important indicators, like growing personal debt.
As I have written over and over, this is the result of the private economy - but elected officials get blamed for it.
Part of this is by design, as part of the current economic orthodoxy, which asserts, based on false assumptions, that inflation in private prices is not caused by private companies increasing prices, but by government spending, which leads to customers having too much money, and they bid up prices. This is not just wrong, it is stupidly, self-evidently wrong.
As Matt Stoller wrote, something like 27% of all inflation was due to oil company price fixing. Companies have record profits, which means there is record extraction from customers happening. People with concentrated market power can use it to get higher prices than they would have to if there were genuine competition.
Of course, people have ideologies - of race, religion, and other types of cultural identity that drive their decisions - so people focus on how that can change, instead of looking at the things that can change, and that could change people’s votes.
People want to push back on the idea that people could vote based on the economy - treating the price of milk and eggs as something small. People should understand that for many, many people, it’s not just experiencing sticker shock that the price of food has gone up. It is that suddenly they are struggling to afford fresh healthy food like eggs and milk, or put gas in their car, and it is harder to afford a house at any time in history.
Generally speaking, people think that when their party is in power, things are better than they actually are. They want to focus on the positive, and this deception is also self-deception.
While recognizing that this outcome was certainly driven by poisonous politics, I also believe that it is important to recognize the economic factor, for several reasons.
If one accepts that - that people are in distress, and they believed Trump when he said he would be better, they believed him.
After all, if all these Nobel Winning Economists and the Democrats were going to make their life so much better, why weren’t they doing it right then? The answer is that they are all neoclassical economists, when we need a new Keynesian solution.
From an economic point of view, it was a change election.
I also think that while the loss is bitter, because it was so important, if people recognize and accept that, then that gives them a reason to continue to reach out to those voters, because if they are disappointed in two years, and they surely will be, they will switch back.
Governments are essentially courts - which gather evidence debate, and continually make new laws in order to adapt to a changing reality - new technology, new rights, new competition, new threats new opportunities. Corporations are dictatorships.
One of the things that Marx recognized about capitalism was that, in all the chaos of society, was that corporations themselves were supremely well organized islands of order. He then modelled the Communist state on the corporation. The problem with this notion, is that if you contrast government to corporations, one of the things you will note is that corporations go broke all the time. The success rate in the first five years of businesses is 50%. Businesses will seek efficiencies by stripping out duplication, which is seen as extra.
However in government, redundancy, back-ups and failsafes are the way you increase certainty and ensure resilience and a capacity to respond in event of an inexpected crisis.
Governments persist. This is the other thing that these tech geniuses, whose understanding of government is mostly from make-believe books like Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman or some other Libertarian fantasy. Developed, wealthy countries have always had strong governments because the challenge of government is the challenge of keeping the peace and minimizing destructive conflict.
Empower people and disempower monopolies. The reality is that without governments, laws and enforcement, (to say nothing of energy, clean water, air, land and people) there can be no economy at all. The hardest problems we have to solve are not technical problems. They are always problems involving other human beings.
America and the world need a New Deal. They will not get it from Trump, because he is surrounded by ideologues who don’t understand how government and its finances actually work. We’ve been using the same tools to try to fix the economy for nearly 50 years. It’s not working. This is what the supposed tech geniuses who think that government would work better if it worked like a corporation don’t understand.
In the U.S. and Canada, that organization can be built at the grassroots level. Focus on jobs first - re-industrializations, access to capital for entrepreneurs, debt relief for students, farmers and more. Put people to work in good jobs. Create local businesses. Clean up messes. There are plenty of sensible economists with good policy ideas - debt relief, job guarantees, business development banks, green jobs programs - that can make the transformation work.
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