I very much appreciate the effort you put into this article, and I love the links to external resources. As an older retired person, I may have too much time on my hands, but in following some of your links, I found a few very good resources I didn’t know about. You are a very hard-working human and I’m glad to benefit from your passion. I very much hope you too are benefiting from your efforts.
I think there is a problem with creators/influencers/pundits etc trying too hard to flatter their audiences and validate their feelings, even when those feelings are ultimately grounded in ignorance or misconceptions. The Founders were quite explicit that a democratic system of government can only function when the public is “virtuous” in some way, and I think that requires a willingness to be a bit more judgmental of the public when they are wrong.
This was a good post overall, but I think even you felt the need to front-load the discussion with a bit too much talk about why the public *might* have a point if you squint hard enough, before getting to all the data showing the reasons why the public is actually quite substantially misinformed about a lot of stuff. That’s the wrong order of operations, in my opinion.
I feel like such an anomaly as a 27 year old white dude. No matter how broke I am (and still am), I would never trust this man to fix America's problems.
But I do believe that inequality drives populism, and maybe this was predetermined by cycles under capitalism.
"The vibecession isn't just about feeling bad when the data looks good - it's about the gap between policy promises and daily reality."
I find it interesting that "vibes", a term popularized in the 60s, is being used as shorthand to describe the rational vs. emotional analysis described by Mackay almost two centuries ago. The author seems to be suggesting that we have "bad vibes" or a vibecession due to inaccurate emotional assessments of the current situtation. But as any 60s hippie would tell you, you can't explain away bad vibes and inauthenticity is a big vibe killer. Labeling a huge deficit spending bill the "inflation reduction act"? Inauthentic. Pretending the obvious decline of the President was not happening? Inauthentic. Pretending that the back room deals that pushed Joe out and substituted Kamala in without any input from the voters was "democracy"? Inauthentic. And then pretending that Harris/Walz were not connected to the policies of the Biden/Harris administration? Very inauthentic.
Inauthencic = bad vibes = vibecession. Just ask any 60s hippie.
I think this is the counter side of the boost in votes Trump received from going on podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience. Authenticity wins people over, online and offline. Trump is an ass, in a variety of ways, but he is a seemingly authentic ass. Kamala and the entire Democratic Party continued to facade like career politicians have done for decades if not centuries. With the flood of information we receive now from the internet, there are too many opportunities for people to poke holes in that facade (whether factually or outright lies).
You are better off being an authentic felon than attempting to present yourself as a perfectly polished representative of the public. Which is a horrifically scary thought, but the reality we are in.
I genuinely wonder what the next four years will bring us. We seem to be reaching a crux in this timeline. Hopefully we can overcome it and survive.
Again, and respectfully: I must stress that traditional economic indicators are simply not the right metrics to gauge how well average people are doing today. The assumption was always that a strong economy benefited everyone; but today, thanks to reduces wages, weakened workers' rights, and soaring prices, a strong economy only serves the wealthy; everyone else is doing worse because their wages haven't kept up with inflation. And that really is the chief takeaway economists need, here: wages have to keep up with inflation, or the strength of the economy doesn't matter. It's not just vibes; workers have been squeezed into lower compensation, higher healthcare costs, higher housing costs, and more expensive groceries. If a strong economy doesn't address that, it isn't going to matter.
I donated to Harris' campaign, but the voices of workers were resounding: no matter how strong you say the economy is, it isn't strong for us.
It contains data that helps to better explain how wages higher wages aren't what needs to be addressed, rather it is lower wages elsewhere being too low. When we are not cost effective, we lack leverage over our pay, the prices we pay, and the hours we work. All three serve as a comprehensive barrier to actually being able to live comfortably at all. hire, fire, cut, replace, and raise money. That is the standard by which massive companies operate. They have full authority to do so. And so they do so. We are powerless.
You fail to realize that our wages being raised is what feeds into the problem. Any business can simply reduce head count or raise their prices to facilitate your wage gains. American is not cost effective any more. We are no longer productive enough to save company money compared to other nations. Our wages out pace the majority of the world's wages by anywhere from 33% amongst first world nations to over 50,000% of most third world countries. Note the second half.
Look at this article here, it does an excellent job demonstrating how we are basically paying a premium on labor that costs very little in the southern hemisphere yet costs us way more money when it is done on our shores.
These corporations are having their cake and eating it too. If you made it more expensive to hire people outside of our country, then it reduces the incentive to hire elsewhere in such large numbers. Taxing them from within gives them more of an excuse to justify their pricing. We have to meet higher expectations to keep our jobs. Those expectations are becoming unreachable.
And this is why they will continue to keep making more money. Because you think the rest of the world working for peanuts isn't being used against us. It most certainly is. Why hire one american if you can hire 50 people in brazil for the same amount of money? Why have one person do a job that is much easier with more people involved working just as hard for less? Pray do tell, what incentive does a company have in hiring one of us if an entire team worth of workers would do it collectively at the same cost? Since the cheaper labor does not push for higher wages, it makes them more attractive for reducing production costs there by keeping more money in the pockets of the investors. The prices of the goods they produce do not go up nearly as fast as they do here. Not because it is closer, but because the number of customers won't go up if they raise the price. So they keep the price lower down there as to keep the money flowing inwards from poorer countries consistent. They aren't just going to price themselves out of the market so easily. Too big to fail means they do not need us but we need them.
I may have been overestimating to an extent, but that aside, we still cost more to employ per capita. Honestly, I get the feeling that you must be someone who just abhors saving money. Why spend more when you can save more?
The cost of living is lower. With the cost of living being lower in Brazil, if you were to compare how much money gets dedicated to living expenses on a purely percentage based outlook, you will find that it is more on par. If the currencies were worth the same amount here and there, we are almost even. But since their currency holds less value, combined with their costs being lower then ours, the fact that we have more spending power means that one us dollar here does not go as far here as it does elsewhere. The exchange rate muddies the waters here. One hour of labor here does not hold the same value as one hour of labor somewhere else. With the economic gap between the US and the rest of the world being as wide as it is currently, it enables for our money to stretch further then it otherwise would locally. The cost of living difference allows American companies to get more head count at no added expense to them. We do not have control over shipping rate expenses. The rest of the world can charge us more money and get away with it, the same can not be said on our end. Since we import a lot of goods rather then export, a nation like China can just jack up the cost of delivering things to us despite no changes in workflow., distance traveled or wages paid.
We have more money (spending power) therefore we can be billed more without us having any say. They know how much money we make, they know how much we often spend, we make more then them, so we are easier to exploit.
I apologize for any misunderstanding. How do we as a country, expand our customer base while alleviating our own? When no one else wants to pay the same amount for our stuff that we do? When we are the only ones who has the capital to pay for any price increases? The United States has no leverage over foreign companies making us pay more, while lacking the leverage needed to make others pay more to us.
The cost of business in America is the highest in the world, only rivaled by that of the UK and the EU. The more it costs to run a business, the less they will pop up over time and the more frequent they will leave us to rot.
I’m a little bemused that “vibes” and “post-truth” describe the same phenomenon as the word “truthiness”. That’s the old Colbert fan in me talking, I guess.
As for priorities going forward, will the next kind of progressivism the Dems will embrace be Ezra Klein’s “supply-side progressivism” or Kate Aronoff’s “pool party progressivism”? Will it be Matt Stoller’s “deliverism” or the IFP/FAI/Niskanen crowd’s take on “abundance”? I lean toward Stoller and Aronoff, but it’s an open question we might not see answered by 2028.
In any case, fully agreed on the social media ecosystem, though I would add that local media still needs to be urgently revived, and corporate media needs to lean into the norm of moral clarity and ‘the stakes, not the odds’, as a way of establishing communal ground truth. I would not leave that to technologists who think Ground News and the like to be a good solution, or even a useful heuristic
I also think you're being a bit too charitable to voters. The voters made a dumb decision. All of the information was available, but stupidity carried the day
Well what can be expected from a nation that keeps voting for what it wants instead of voting for what it needs? No one bothers to consider how long good times will actually last. Good today, ruined tomorrow. We keep chasing short term goals at the expense of long term pay offs. We need it to last. If the good times don't last after getting what we voted for, we still got what we picked out. We just don't get the intended outcome.
I think for the average person inflation and structural unaffordability get kind of muddled. It always sucks to have more needs than $ for each pay period, and reliable paths to success are getting harder. I can yell about how it's the wages that are too damn low, and someone else can yell about the price of cars, but it feels like things can't possibly go on this way.
I don't know that people are as badly informed about inflation as economists think. Yes, setting interest rates is Hard Actually. But if people are actually mad that the price of eggs skyrocketed, just mandate all chicken farmers vaccinate their flocks against avian influenza or enforce the anti price gauging laws that already exist. Maybe some of the inflation has fewer tradeoffs than economists want to emphasize? Maybe some blue cities really do need to just build more housing to get that giant budget line item down?
I think the media ecosystem people find themselves in matters a lot, and it's changing incredibly rapidly. That said, something Hank Green pointed out about the Ipsos poll on misinformed voters is that we really need to ask some questions like "is housing affordability at an all time high?" to make any useful generalizations about Trump voters being less informed.
The media sources data is also interesting, because it "newspapers super biased for Democrats" is arguably more supported by the chart than "Trump voters are in a social media bubble".
I think about the Policy and Person disconnect differently than you do. To me, the simplest explanation is "Oh, being a Black, Indian woman in power is Hard Actually". Yeah, the Democrats will learn the wrong lessons if they throw up their hands and say "whelp, we're still racist/sexist and voters are just terrible!". But the Symbolic Capital piece is quite bad- we can't always give the white dudes a pass just cause 55% of them voted for Reagan and minorities can ALSO do a racism. People liked Hilary's policies too. There's always going to be something Wrong with the specific woman, even when people *say* they want a woman.
I think you're partially right there is an implementation gap, and that Biden didn't deliver enough on real things that materially helped immediately. I'm still trying to get my head around a world in which Trump got us a child tax credit and Biden took it away. Stupid. And I do think that the *rhetoric* of Democrats is frustratingly far from what they deliver. But let's be real: Trump never delivered any of the *good* parts of his rhetoric either. Neither party is investing in the middle class. And they won't unless we're honest that they aren't trying.
All that said, *this*: "Trust is clearly the most expensive thing in the world right now, anecdote is more powerful than data and people want to understand things, they sometimes just don’t know how. The solution isn't to fight this reality."- *THIS IS SO RIGHT*. This is so much better than just throwing up our hands and saying truth doesn't matter. Trust matters. Stories/narratives matter, and "vibes". Because when there are 10,000 different economic data points? There might as well be 0. Because nobody processes information like that. Information overload is different from a "post truth society". It's both simpler and harder to address, but people do care about what is actually happening. They just can't trust politicians to do anything about it. And that's how we ended up where we are.
The wage economy is struggling, while the asset economy is booming. The paradox of Trump promising to fix it, despite being an asset owner himself, is quite the sleight of hand. It’s fair to say the elites simply rebranded under Trump and stayed in control.
The quality of your essays justifies to take time reading them, and that's I love to keep them for the weekend. Another master piece!
So a major aspect of why Trump won is due to a disconnect between facts and stories, and his policy is going to widen that disconnect. Makes sense, doesn't it? For him, that is. But we also have a disconnect between economic metrics and how happy people live and I didn't hear Harris caring about the latter. And there's the PR disaster: Trump voters were called garbage and Trump was photographed in a garbage truck: Hilarious. Harris was photographed for the cover of Vogue. That made me speechless.
You mention poor implementations, e.g. housing. That is immediately related to how happy people live and no word can excuse the damage done. And nobody tried to. Nobody even acknowledged it. So many years of failure can't be made up for in an election campaign and they do ruin trust in institutions.
It's certainly about time to do something. Why do nations fail? That has been answered based on facts and award with a Nobel price this year. There is a blue print for success and both parties ignore it: Trusted, functional, efficient institutions that do provide a benefit for the majority. Everything you suggest fits into that scheme. I have yet to hear any politician say "Oh thanks, so that's what we need to do.", anywhere.
“But they want to cut the deficit by about $2T (and are looking to raise about $50 million to do so) - which is very much needed if Trump imposes tariffs and extends tax cuts. They will need to cut social security and medicare. That will be unpopular.
And of course, if they can achieve it, it would be spectacular.” Do I misunderstand? Of course cutting the deficit is good but why at the expense of Medicare and SSI? How will that help a struggling middle and lower middle class?
Yes I understand the young carry a much heavier burden now concerning SSI than they did when the program started. I for one, as a baby boomer, am happy to retire my life sooner rather than later. As someone said the medical profession has done a marvelous job extending life, but we have not kept pace economically. Many are overextended; debt is rampant. Values totally askew imo.
Having that event called "spectacular" doesn't mean necessarily good, but generally as earth-shattering. Like how an earthquake is spectacular. And yeah this certainly won't be good in the near term.
That said, Scott Galloway has talked of the generational transfer in that such a heavy thumb on the social-security scale bankrupts the young to favour the large, old voting block. Having three working-age citizens (and falling) for every retiree does not forecast well if status quo continues.
Side note, messing with the 2nd amendment is also career suicide so if the guy who had three attempts on his life (this election year) chose to mess with that, he is probably the person who'd experience the least blowback in such a move. Spectacular as well, but for better or worse remains to be determined.
Public relations / mass communications guy here. 🙋♂️ This is an absolutely wonderful piece on the state of communications and the important parts of what good communications is. I teach a course in advanced public relations writing, and I just used this article in class to direct students on the current state of media.
I appreciate this article. I think it was well written and provides a lot of context as most of your content does. I would like to add that it's not just about agenda and messaging but also capiagning as well. Until I saw Northern Virginia drops, I had thought Harris had a better chance than a coin flip to win. I largely agree with James Carville and People's Pundit, elections, particularly in the United States, are a cultural game. The Republicans just had a better ground game. Registering voters was/is the key to winning elections. Trump campaign focusing on Pennsylvania and getting male students (as you said), Amish, German/Irish/Polish Catholics (The reason why Trump kept posting about Mary and the rest of the Saints) out to register was a strategic gamble that paid off for them. Might have to write something coherent about this myself instead of a jumbled comment. Just thought I'd add that GOP was much better run. On the economics side this was very good. Thanks!
What your describing is essentially their lack of understanding human psychology. The issues with the US economy stem from psychological behavior. These rich CEOs and their investors know it far too well. They are using carrot and stick tactics to keep their customers trapped in a loop while simultaneously making more money off of the solutions that their customers and workers come up with.
All democrats needed to do, was provide successful results to the masses. They made the mistake of thinking they could simply set peoples expectations for them, to minimize effort and maximize credibility without any concerted effort. There is only so much laziness people are willing to dismiss before they grew impatient. Impatient people do not get along with lazy people, trust me I have seen too many examples to number them all. When patience wears thin, you cannot simply tell people to wait any longer, they will not wait for you, they will instead leave you in the dust for wasting too much time. We do not live forever. We can only struggle for so long before it becomes unbearable. Unbearable circumstances lead to irrational behavior in the form of desperation. Desperation is an instinctual reaction to overwhelming adversity.
I very much appreciate the effort you put into this article, and I love the links to external resources. As an older retired person, I may have too much time on my hands, but in following some of your links, I found a few very good resources I didn’t know about. You are a very hard-working human and I’m glad to benefit from your passion. I very much hope you too are benefiting from your efforts.
This is a fantastic summary. I appreciate your efforts here.
I think there is a problem with creators/influencers/pundits etc trying too hard to flatter their audiences and validate their feelings, even when those feelings are ultimately grounded in ignorance or misconceptions. The Founders were quite explicit that a democratic system of government can only function when the public is “virtuous” in some way, and I think that requires a willingness to be a bit more judgmental of the public when they are wrong.
This was a good post overall, but I think even you felt the need to front-load the discussion with a bit too much talk about why the public *might* have a point if you squint hard enough, before getting to all the data showing the reasons why the public is actually quite substantially misinformed about a lot of stuff. That’s the wrong order of operations, in my opinion.
I cried so much over the results.
I feel like such an anomaly as a 27 year old white dude. No matter how broke I am (and still am), I would never trust this man to fix America's problems.
But I do believe that inequality drives populism, and maybe this was predetermined by cycles under capitalism.
Phenomenal. I am in general already over retrospectives, but this one pretty much put a bow on the last while for me.
"The vibecession isn't just about feeling bad when the data looks good - it's about the gap between policy promises and daily reality."
I find it interesting that "vibes", a term popularized in the 60s, is being used as shorthand to describe the rational vs. emotional analysis described by Mackay almost two centuries ago. The author seems to be suggesting that we have "bad vibes" or a vibecession due to inaccurate emotional assessments of the current situtation. But as any 60s hippie would tell you, you can't explain away bad vibes and inauthenticity is a big vibe killer. Labeling a huge deficit spending bill the "inflation reduction act"? Inauthentic. Pretending the obvious decline of the President was not happening? Inauthentic. Pretending that the back room deals that pushed Joe out and substituted Kamala in without any input from the voters was "democracy"? Inauthentic. And then pretending that Harris/Walz were not connected to the policies of the Biden/Harris administration? Very inauthentic.
Inauthencic = bad vibes = vibecession. Just ask any 60s hippie.
I think this is the counter side of the boost in votes Trump received from going on podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience. Authenticity wins people over, online and offline. Trump is an ass, in a variety of ways, but he is a seemingly authentic ass. Kamala and the entire Democratic Party continued to facade like career politicians have done for decades if not centuries. With the flood of information we receive now from the internet, there are too many opportunities for people to poke holes in that facade (whether factually or outright lies).
You are better off being an authentic felon than attempting to present yourself as a perfectly polished representative of the public. Which is a horrifically scary thought, but the reality we are in.
I genuinely wonder what the next four years will bring us. We seem to be reaching a crux in this timeline. Hopefully we can overcome it and survive.
Very small tweak: the Fed decreased rates 25 basis points, not increased :)
yes, thanks. Stuck in the past. Did that on my last piece too.
No worries! :)
Again, and respectfully: I must stress that traditional economic indicators are simply not the right metrics to gauge how well average people are doing today. The assumption was always that a strong economy benefited everyone; but today, thanks to reduces wages, weakened workers' rights, and soaring prices, a strong economy only serves the wealthy; everyone else is doing worse because their wages haven't kept up with inflation. And that really is the chief takeaway economists need, here: wages have to keep up with inflation, or the strength of the economy doesn't matter. It's not just vibes; workers have been squeezed into lower compensation, higher healthcare costs, higher housing costs, and more expensive groceries. If a strong economy doesn't address that, it isn't going to matter.
I donated to Harris' campaign, but the voices of workers were resounding: no matter how strong you say the economy is, it isn't strong for us.
This is exactly what I write about in this piece. Did you read this piece?
I heartily agree with it. Sorry if my comment sounds like it's addressing you; I just want people to know your voice is not an outlier.
Probably because it's a near-copy of a comment I left on a forum for Democrats lol.
Have you read this article Kyla?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49687-y
It contains data that helps to better explain how wages higher wages aren't what needs to be addressed, rather it is lower wages elsewhere being too low. When we are not cost effective, we lack leverage over our pay, the prices we pay, and the hours we work. All three serve as a comprehensive barrier to actually being able to live comfortably at all. hire, fire, cut, replace, and raise money. That is the standard by which massive companies operate. They have full authority to do so. And so they do so. We are powerless.
You fail to realize that our wages being raised is what feeds into the problem. Any business can simply reduce head count or raise their prices to facilitate your wage gains. American is not cost effective any more. We are no longer productive enough to save company money compared to other nations. Our wages out pace the majority of the world's wages by anywhere from 33% amongst first world nations to over 50,000% of most third world countries. Note the second half.
Look at this article here, it does an excellent job demonstrating how we are basically paying a premium on labor that costs very little in the southern hemisphere yet costs us way more money when it is done on our shores.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49687-y
These corporations are having their cake and eating it too. If you made it more expensive to hire people outside of our country, then it reduces the incentive to hire elsewhere in such large numbers. Taxing them from within gives them more of an excuse to justify their pricing. We have to meet higher expectations to keep our jobs. Those expectations are becoming unreachable.
Your comment makes little sense, given that our wages haven't been going up anywhere near the amount corporate profits have.
And this is why they will continue to keep making more money. Because you think the rest of the world working for peanuts isn't being used against us. It most certainly is. Why hire one american if you can hire 50 people in brazil for the same amount of money? Why have one person do a job that is much easier with more people involved working just as hard for less? Pray do tell, what incentive does a company have in hiring one of us if an entire team worth of workers would do it collectively at the same cost? Since the cheaper labor does not push for higher wages, it makes them more attractive for reducing production costs there by keeping more money in the pockets of the investors. The prices of the goods they produce do not go up nearly as fast as they do here. Not because it is closer, but because the number of customers won't go up if they raise the price. So they keep the price lower down there as to keep the money flowing inwards from poorer countries consistent. They aren't just going to price themselves out of the market so easily. Too big to fail means they do not need us but we need them.
You cannot hire 50 Brazilian workers for the price of a single American one. You are making assumptions that do not exist in reality.
https://www.livetecs.com/blog/average-salary-in-brazil-2024/
I may have been overestimating to an extent, but that aside, we still cost more to employ per capita. Honestly, I get the feeling that you must be someone who just abhors saving money. Why spend more when you can save more?
The cost of living is lower. With the cost of living being lower in Brazil, if you were to compare how much money gets dedicated to living expenses on a purely percentage based outlook, you will find that it is more on par. If the currencies were worth the same amount here and there, we are almost even. But since their currency holds less value, combined with their costs being lower then ours, the fact that we have more spending power means that one us dollar here does not go as far here as it does elsewhere. The exchange rate muddies the waters here. One hour of labor here does not hold the same value as one hour of labor somewhere else. With the economic gap between the US and the rest of the world being as wide as it is currently, it enables for our money to stretch further then it otherwise would locally. The cost of living difference allows American companies to get more head count at no added expense to them. We do not have control over shipping rate expenses. The rest of the world can charge us more money and get away with it, the same can not be said on our end. Since we import a lot of goods rather then export, a nation like China can just jack up the cost of delivering things to us despite no changes in workflow., distance traveled or wages paid.
We have more money (spending power) therefore we can be billed more without us having any say. They know how much money we make, they know how much we often spend, we make more then them, so we are easier to exploit.
I apologize for any misunderstanding. How do we as a country, expand our customer base while alleviating our own? When no one else wants to pay the same amount for our stuff that we do? When we are the only ones who has the capital to pay for any price increases? The United States has no leverage over foreign companies making us pay more, while lacking the leverage needed to make others pay more to us.
The cost of business in America is the highest in the world, only rivaled by that of the UK and the EU. The more it costs to run a business, the less they will pop up over time and the more frequent they will leave us to rot.
I’m a little bemused that “vibes” and “post-truth” describe the same phenomenon as the word “truthiness”. That’s the old Colbert fan in me talking, I guess.
As for priorities going forward, will the next kind of progressivism the Dems will embrace be Ezra Klein’s “supply-side progressivism” or Kate Aronoff’s “pool party progressivism”? Will it be Matt Stoller’s “deliverism” or the IFP/FAI/Niskanen crowd’s take on “abundance”? I lean toward Stoller and Aronoff, but it’s an open question we might not see answered by 2028.
In any case, fully agreed on the social media ecosystem, though I would add that local media still needs to be urgently revived, and corporate media needs to lean into the norm of moral clarity and ‘the stakes, not the odds’, as a way of establishing communal ground truth. I would not leave that to technologists who think Ground News and the like to be a good solution, or even a useful heuristic
Good post.
I also think you're being a bit too charitable to voters. The voters made a dumb decision. All of the information was available, but stupidity carried the day
It really is the case that we have gotten stupider over time as a nation
Idiocracy here we come!
Well what can be expected from a nation that keeps voting for what it wants instead of voting for what it needs? No one bothers to consider how long good times will actually last. Good today, ruined tomorrow. We keep chasing short term goals at the expense of long term pay offs. We need it to last. If the good times don't last after getting what we voted for, we still got what we picked out. We just don't get the intended outcome.
There's a lot here that resonates with me.
I think for the average person inflation and structural unaffordability get kind of muddled. It always sucks to have more needs than $ for each pay period, and reliable paths to success are getting harder. I can yell about how it's the wages that are too damn low, and someone else can yell about the price of cars, but it feels like things can't possibly go on this way.
I don't know that people are as badly informed about inflation as economists think. Yes, setting interest rates is Hard Actually. But if people are actually mad that the price of eggs skyrocketed, just mandate all chicken farmers vaccinate their flocks against avian influenza or enforce the anti price gauging laws that already exist. Maybe some of the inflation has fewer tradeoffs than economists want to emphasize? Maybe some blue cities really do need to just build more housing to get that giant budget line item down?
I think the media ecosystem people find themselves in matters a lot, and it's changing incredibly rapidly. That said, something Hank Green pointed out about the Ipsos poll on misinformed voters is that we really need to ask some questions like "is housing affordability at an all time high?" to make any useful generalizations about Trump voters being less informed.
The media sources data is also interesting, because it "newspapers super biased for Democrats" is arguably more supported by the chart than "Trump voters are in a social media bubble".
I think about the Policy and Person disconnect differently than you do. To me, the simplest explanation is "Oh, being a Black, Indian woman in power is Hard Actually". Yeah, the Democrats will learn the wrong lessons if they throw up their hands and say "whelp, we're still racist/sexist and voters are just terrible!". But the Symbolic Capital piece is quite bad- we can't always give the white dudes a pass just cause 55% of them voted for Reagan and minorities can ALSO do a racism. People liked Hilary's policies too. There's always going to be something Wrong with the specific woman, even when people *say* they want a woman.
I think you're partially right there is an implementation gap, and that Biden didn't deliver enough on real things that materially helped immediately. I'm still trying to get my head around a world in which Trump got us a child tax credit and Biden took it away. Stupid. And I do think that the *rhetoric* of Democrats is frustratingly far from what they deliver. But let's be real: Trump never delivered any of the *good* parts of his rhetoric either. Neither party is investing in the middle class. And they won't unless we're honest that they aren't trying.
All that said, *this*: "Trust is clearly the most expensive thing in the world right now, anecdote is more powerful than data and people want to understand things, they sometimes just don’t know how. The solution isn't to fight this reality."- *THIS IS SO RIGHT*. This is so much better than just throwing up our hands and saying truth doesn't matter. Trust matters. Stories/narratives matter, and "vibes". Because when there are 10,000 different economic data points? There might as well be 0. Because nobody processes information like that. Information overload is different from a "post truth society". It's both simpler and harder to address, but people do care about what is actually happening. They just can't trust politicians to do anything about it. And that's how we ended up where we are.
The wage economy is struggling, while the asset economy is booming. The paradox of Trump promising to fix it, despite being an asset owner himself, is quite the sleight of hand. It’s fair to say the elites simply rebranded under Trump and stayed in control.
The quality of your essays justifies to take time reading them, and that's I love to keep them for the weekend. Another master piece!
So a major aspect of why Trump won is due to a disconnect between facts and stories, and his policy is going to widen that disconnect. Makes sense, doesn't it? For him, that is. But we also have a disconnect between economic metrics and how happy people live and I didn't hear Harris caring about the latter. And there's the PR disaster: Trump voters were called garbage and Trump was photographed in a garbage truck: Hilarious. Harris was photographed for the cover of Vogue. That made me speechless.
You mention poor implementations, e.g. housing. That is immediately related to how happy people live and no word can excuse the damage done. And nobody tried to. Nobody even acknowledged it. So many years of failure can't be made up for in an election campaign and they do ruin trust in institutions.
It's certainly about time to do something. Why do nations fail? That has been answered based on facts and award with a Nobel price this year. There is a blue print for success and both parties ignore it: Trusted, functional, efficient institutions that do provide a benefit for the majority. Everything you suggest fits into that scheme. I have yet to hear any politician say "Oh thanks, so that's what we need to do.", anywhere.
“But they want to cut the deficit by about $2T (and are looking to raise about $50 million to do so) - which is very much needed if Trump imposes tariffs and extends tax cuts. They will need to cut social security and medicare. That will be unpopular.
And of course, if they can achieve it, it would be spectacular.” Do I misunderstand? Of course cutting the deficit is good but why at the expense of Medicare and SSI? How will that help a struggling middle and lower middle class?
Yes I understand the young carry a much heavier burden now concerning SSI than they did when the program started. I for one, as a baby boomer, am happy to retire my life sooner rather than later. As someone said the medical profession has done a marvelous job extending life, but we have not kept pace economically. Many are overextended; debt is rampant. Values totally askew imo.
Having that event called "spectacular" doesn't mean necessarily good, but generally as earth-shattering. Like how an earthquake is spectacular. And yeah this certainly won't be good in the near term.
That said, Scott Galloway has talked of the generational transfer in that such a heavy thumb on the social-security scale bankrupts the young to favour the large, old voting block. Having three working-age citizens (and falling) for every retiree does not forecast well if status quo continues.
Side note, messing with the 2nd amendment is also career suicide so if the guy who had three attempts on his life (this election year) chose to mess with that, he is probably the person who'd experience the least blowback in such a move. Spectacular as well, but for better or worse remains to be determined.
Public relations / mass communications guy here. 🙋♂️ This is an absolutely wonderful piece on the state of communications and the important parts of what good communications is. I teach a course in advanced public relations writing, and I just used this article in class to direct students on the current state of media.
I appreciate this article. I think it was well written and provides a lot of context as most of your content does. I would like to add that it's not just about agenda and messaging but also capiagning as well. Until I saw Northern Virginia drops, I had thought Harris had a better chance than a coin flip to win. I largely agree with James Carville and People's Pundit, elections, particularly in the United States, are a cultural game. The Republicans just had a better ground game. Registering voters was/is the key to winning elections. Trump campaign focusing on Pennsylvania and getting male students (as you said), Amish, German/Irish/Polish Catholics (The reason why Trump kept posting about Mary and the rest of the Saints) out to register was a strategic gamble that paid off for them. Might have to write something coherent about this myself instead of a jumbled comment. Just thought I'd add that GOP was much better run. On the economics side this was very good. Thanks!
As in, I don't think Democrats just lost because of popular sentiment but because they failed to utilize popular sentiment that went for them.
Forgot to add this to my explanation but this is what I am referencing.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49687-y
What your describing is essentially their lack of understanding human psychology. The issues with the US economy stem from psychological behavior. These rich CEOs and their investors know it far too well. They are using carrot and stick tactics to keep their customers trapped in a loop while simultaneously making more money off of the solutions that their customers and workers come up with.
All democrats needed to do, was provide successful results to the masses. They made the mistake of thinking they could simply set peoples expectations for them, to minimize effort and maximize credibility without any concerted effort. There is only so much laziness people are willing to dismiss before they grew impatient. Impatient people do not get along with lazy people, trust me I have seen too many examples to number them all. When patience wears thin, you cannot simply tell people to wait any longer, they will not wait for you, they will instead leave you in the dust for wasting too much time. We do not live forever. We can only struggle for so long before it becomes unbearable. Unbearable circumstances lead to irrational behavior in the form of desperation. Desperation is an instinctual reaction to overwhelming adversity.