Yesterday I noted G. Elliott Morris’s argument that extremely poor consumer sentiment in the U.S. is no mystery once you look properly at what Americans mean when they talk about prices and inflation. In short, just because prices stopped going up in the second half of Joe Biden’s presidency didn’t mean the public stopped being mad about them going up (and staying up) in the first half of his term. I’m pretty certain that this explains a lot about what sank Biden’s presidency and the dynamics of the 2024 election. But does it explain what’s happening now? When I wrote yesterday’s post, TPM Reader SB agreed, but argued that it went beyond that — that the still-declining consumer sentiment, the extremely sour public mood goes beyond the post-COVID inflation shock. It’s also about extreme wealth inequality, SB argued. Then, this morning, Paul Krugman began what he says will be a series of posts on his Substack in which he argues that while he agrees with the “excess price” framework, he’s not sure it’s a sufficient explanation.
Krugman didn’t really get into what exactly he thinks it is. As I said, he said he’ll address it in a series of posts. But the gist is that there’s a larger politico-economic explanation that goes beyond how long people stay mad about prices. Krugman says he thinks the deepening sense of economic gloom is driven by the fact that the public was upset about inflation, voted to move in a direction and then had the new guy do basically everything he could to stoke more inflation into the economy and generally whipsaw the economy in 20 different directions for a series of bizarre and obscure ideological fascinations.
I’m not sure whether it’s income inequality or the bait-and-switch of the second Trump presidency. But I was never convinced that the oddities of the 2024 election were about right-wing media dominance. It’s part of the equation — but it’s not a sufficient or satisfying explanation. There’s a deeper breakdown of the civic contract. I’m not certain what that breakdown is. I have lots of ideas. But I’m cautious about my — and everyone’s — tendency to fill in the blank with what they want the answer to be, what fits our own preconceptions. So I’m curious to hear what Krugman proposes.
What I’m more clear on is that democracy, as we often think about it, is a thin vision. I think many of us grew up taking for granted that allotting political power on the basis of adult voting was an obvious good and efficiency. And with the growth of electoral democracies after the World War II, and then with the end of the Cold War, it was just a kind of unfolding process by which the rest of the people in the world either figured this out or had the opportunity to partake in it. Probably most of us would not put it quite so naively. But still, that’s kind of the backdrop of a lot of the post-Cold War era. The rule of feral billionaires, wealth inequality generally, the ebbing of a relative freedom to live full lives — all things that are eating away at confidence in public institutions and leaders. I’ve mentioned a number of times that the post-World War II and post-Cold War systems have been irrevocably broken. Something new has to be built on top of it. Functioning elections and baseline adherence to the rule of law aren’t sufficient. They’re the shell, the superstructure in which a certain kind of common, but plural American life is possible.
Where we got off track as a country was imagining that those were the whole thing. And that blinded us to a lot of internal rot and decay. These are the questions Democrats, or really the civic democratic opposition to Donald Trump, need to figure out to set the country on a new and better direction. A new civic contract is necessary. Things don’t stay divided and dark forever.