Project Syndicate Whom Will America Elect? May 16, 2024 GARY GERSTLE

 Project Syndicate

Whom Will America Elect?

May 16, 2024

GARY GERSTLE

While many elements of the 2024 US presidential election are unprecedented, others are eerily similar to past contests in which fast-evolving economic and social developments favored the challenger over the incumbent. In such circumstances, dangerous, previously inconceivable outcomes can suddenly become plausible.

CAMBRIDGE – January 6, 2021, remains one of the most shocking days in United States history, with tens of millions of Americans staring in disbelief at their TVs and computer screens as Donald Trump’s attempted coup unfolded before them in real time. Never before had a US president authorized his supporters to storm the “people’s house” to halt an essential democratic process, namely the certification of an election and the orderly and peaceful transfer of power from one president to another.

Many institutions and individuals have since sought to hold Trump accountable for his actions. The congressional January 6 Committee documented the attempted coup in chilling and dispiriting detail. A special counsel appointed by the US attorney general indicted Trump both for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election and for illegally keeping classified national-security documents in his Mar-a-Lago home after he left the White House, and after he had been asked to return them. Legislatures, courts, and appointed officials attempted to keep Trump off election ballots in their states on the grounds that he was an insurrectionist, and thus in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

As of this writing, Alvin Bragg, the district attorney for New York County, is prosecuting Trump for allegedly falsifying business records to cover up his use of 2016 campaign funds to buy the silence of a porn star with whom Trump had an affair. And the state of Georgia has indicted Trump for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results there. Altogether, Trump stands accused of 88 felonies in the four criminal cases filed against him. And yet, most Republicans and a large part of the American electorate seem not to care – or believe, with Trump, that a “deep state,” bent solely on his destruction, has fabricated the charges.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, with three Trump-appointed justices, has intervened twice to stop or delay ongoing legal proceedings against the defendant. And an undisclosed relationship between Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and one of her special prosecutors has sidetracked the proceedings against Trump in Georgia. As a result, only one of the four criminal cases is likely to conclude before the 2024 November election. Should Trump win in November, he will appoint an attorney general who will likely drop all federal charges against him; and though he would lack jurisdiction over the Georgia case, it is likely to remain too mired in controversy to succeed.

Trump would not be the first president to be ousted from office, only to run again and win. That honor belongs to Grover Cleveland, president from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897. Nor, if convicted in the “porn-star” case this summer, would Trump become the first convicted criminal to seek the presidency: after being jailed for antiwar sedition, Socialist Eugene V. Debs ran his 1920 campaign from a federal penitentiary. And nor is Trump the first to use illicit means to bend an election in his favor.

Still, Trump’s willingness to do anything to keep or regain political power may well exceed that of all past presidential nominees running on major party tickets. In December 2023, Trump spoke openly about being a dictator on “day one” of his second presidency. When asked recently by a Time interviewer if he understood why “so many Americans see language like that, you know, dictator for a day, suspending the Constitution” as dangerous, Trump replied swiftly and unequivocally, “I think a lot of people like it.” Expressing contempt for democracy and the Constitution has now become a reasonable – even fashionable – position for a US presidential nominee to hold.

IT’S THE ECONOMY

As for the incumbent, he has gotten little credit for his presidency, despite several big wins. Among other things, Joe Biden steered through Congress the biggest infrastructure legislation since Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, which oversaw the postwar construction of the US interstate highway system. Already, more than 57,000 individual projects have been approved and funded – an extraordinary policy accomplishment that more than half of Americans know nothing about.

Biden has also won congressional approval for the massive reshoring of semiconductor manufacturing, and for the most consequential green-energy legislation in US history. In the process, he has broken from neoliberal orthodoxy, especially the principle that a government must not do anything that interferes with the free play of markets. For the first time in more than 50 years, the US has a clear industrial policy, one that insists that government must ensure that capitalism serves the public interest.

Biden has married this structural economic reform with effective management of most major indicators of individual economic well-being. Unemployment has been below 4% since February 2022; the number of manufacturing jobs is higher than it was a decade ago; and the rate of economic growth in the second half of 2023 (nearly 5%) was higher than most mature industrial economies are thought capable of achieving. Wages at the lower end of the economic spectrum have begun to rise, owing partly to several big wins by organized labor, which the Biden administration has heartily endorsed. The current US economy is the envy of the world.

Despite this impressive record, more than 60% of respondents to an April CNN poll deemed the Biden presidency a failure, and a whopping 66% disapproved of his handling of the economy. Disaffection stems first from inflation. The Trump and Biden administrations each put in place a $1 trillion-plus emergency relief program (in 2020 and 2021, respectively) to sustain people and businesses across a two-year span when the government shut down much of the economy to limit the spread of COVID-19. While these programs worked wonders in terms of giving people a measure of financial security and stimulating a remarkable economic recovery, they also contributed to an inflationary surge that no American under 50 had ever experienced.

The price of commodities that Americans purchased on a daily basis – notably, gasoline and food – soared, as did interest rates, which put home purchases out of reach for millions. The US Federal Reserve, after being slow to act, has done good work, in combination with the Biden administration, to slow the inflation rate to a manageable level (around 3% as of early May). But Americans are still confronting painfully high consumer goods prices, with no relief in sight.

BIDEN’S SHORT STRAW

Thus, Biden has gotten the blame for the inflationary spike, which largely unfolded on his watch, while getting almost no credit for his industrial policy and structural economic reforms – since the benefits of these policies take much longer to become apparent to the general public. The combination of visible failures and invisible successes is a deadly political cocktail, especially when served to a deeply polarized electorate. In these circumstances, broad segments of the electorate have become nostalgic for the “good old days” of the Trump presidency, when a “successful businessman” in the White House brought America peace and prosperity.

This Trump nostalgia also reflects continuing trauma from the pandemic itself: the million-plus lives lost; the massive disruptions to childrearing, education, work, and careers; the terrible isolation and immobility; and the depressive hours that millions spent plunging into online rabbit holes. There is little talk of this trauma in print or in person. The preference among still-rattled cohorts is simply to banish memories of the pandemic years.

But pushing dread and uncertainty below the surface doesn’t make it go away. The longing to return to a pre-COVID era and the conviction that government and society prior to 2020 were heading in a positive direction both lend an air of plausibility to the belief among 55% of Americans that the Trump presidency was a good one. In this context, the dangers that Trump poses to American democracy, and to the country’s social fabric and economic well-being, can be brushed aside all too easily.

None of this means that Trump will win in November. The radicalism of the anti-abortion movement has alarmed millions of women across the political spectrum. They will turn out in force, as they did in 2022, to prevent the triumph of what is beginning to look like a GOP theocracy. Moreover, consumer confidence, even with a dip in April, is up significantly from a year ago; if that indicator resumes an upward trajectory, the sentiment about who is a better manager of the economy – Biden or Trump – may begin to tip in favor of the incumbent.

ANYONE’S GAME

Not many Americans need to change their minds to shift polls in Biden’s direction. Those voters might be independents or Republican defectors upset about the party’s hard line on abortion or Trump’s indifference to the rule of law, or they might be Democratic voters who had previously decided to stay at home on Election Day rather than cast an unenthusiastic vote for Biden.

Both sides have reasons to worry about their base. The tawdry details of Trump’s personal life and corrupt business dealings emerging from the New York trial may cost him a critical share of Republican and independent voters. Biden is threatened most by the lack of enthusiasm for him among young Democrats and progressives. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s independent candidacy could affect the election’s outcome as well, drawing disaffected voters from both the Democratic and Republican camps. His campaign has yet to catch fire, as Ross Perot’s did in 1992 and George Wallace’s did in 1968; but it might still matter in November, given the slim margin that is likely to decide the election.

Some disenchantment with Biden reflects the deep divide over the Israel-Gaza war that has rattled the Democratic Party base. The explosion of pro-Palestinian protests across college campuses this spring is easily the largest student uprising since the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. Even if these protests recede once the academic year concludes, they seem likely to flare up again in August, when the Democratic Party will gather in Chicago for its nominating convention.

The eerie coincidences between 1968 and 2024 – in both cases, New York City police hauled student protesters from the same building at Columbia University on April 30; and the Democratic Party chose Chicago to host its convention – make one wonder whether a third coincidence looms. Will Democratic Party disarray in August hand the White House to the self-proclaimed party of law and order?

If Biden loses, his defeat will be less like that of the loser in 1968, Hubert Humphrey, than that of Jimmy Carter in 1980: another one-term Democratic president who was overwhelmed by economic turmoil at home and by Middle East conflict abroad, despite being widely regarded as a decent man.

Should Biden lose, the question is what, if anything, will survive from his plans to construct a post-neoliberal political economy. Trump would almost certainly dial back Biden’s green-energy policy, despite that policy’s efforts to place a disproportionate number of battery and solar manufacturing plants in Republican-leaning states. But Trump would likely preserve Biden’s infrastructure program and the reshoring of chips manufacturing, as these both command strong bipartisan support. And continuity has already prevailed in America’s China policy, with the Biden administration largely keeping the Trump administration’s tariffs in place.

One intriguing question is whether portions of the Republican Party have become serious about joining the Democrats in advancing an economic populist agenda. Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and J.D. Vance have been working with Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren on legislation that would curb the power of social-media companies and big banks, respectively, while Republican Senator Josh Hawley has found common ground on antitrust with the progressive chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan. If these cross-party initiatives bear fruit, retrospectives on this tumultuous moment may one day come to focus not just on the deep polarization dividing Americans, but also on the shift to a political economy profoundly different from – and perhaps more egalitarian than – the neoliberal one that prevailed from Ronald Reagan’s presidency through Barack Obama’s.

While this shift to a new political economy may be praiseworthy, the outcome will depend on whether the US can find a way to survive the profound threat to democracy that Trump embodies. Much is at stake in 2024, both for America and the world.

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Gary Gerstle

GARY GERSTLE

Writing for PS since 2024

1 Commentary

Gary Gerstle is Emeritus Professor of American History and Director of Research in American History at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge, and the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford University Press, 2022).