What America’s Next Presidential Election Will (Really) Be About

It’s the Economy, Stupid — Even Though It Should Be About: Will We Have a Democracy Much Longer?

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The next American Presidential election. Democracy’s last chance — and autocracy’s waiting triumph. What does it depend on? Sadly, everything but all that. The economy.

Hence, you already hear the chorus of pundits and columnists crying: “are we headed for a recession?!”

I’m going to answer that question, but first a bit of context.

American democracy is already on the ropes. You don’t need me to tell you that — the ugly truth, the elephant, or maybe demon, in the room, is this: during the Trump years America was downgraded to a flawed democracy, from a full one — and it never regained its former status. Not to this day.

If anything, democratic indicators — what we social scientists use to assess the health of polities — are still in sharp, serious, and sometimes shocking decline. From attacks on women’s rights, to the erasure of the LGBTQ, to gay and trans people fleeing states in fear, to book bans, to hostile takeovers of universities, by the kinds of people who think a book is something you burn — nearly every indicator we use to assess the health of democracy is plummeting in America.

Let me give you some of those indicators, so you learn how to think well about democracy, too. Civil liberties — expanding or shrinking? In America, women — that’s more than half of society — are under profound attack, losing basic freedoms of privacy, movement, and expression. Civil society — robust or fragile? That’s everything from local governance to civic organizations, and in America, the fanatics are on the loose: radical groups like “Moms for Liberty” are managing to control the educational agenda of entire states. To the point of banning a new version of…the Diary of Anne Frank. Then there’s the basic functioning of government — and you can see how hard the GOP, and even the Democrat’s own rogues’ gallery, have worked to stall, obstruct, and do everything it can to bring the country to a standstill…yet again…not to mention lining behind Trump and calling being indicted for…espionage…probably the gravest series of charges against a head of state in modern history, yes really — not exactly everyday white-collar bribery or embezzlement, but something far beyond that.

Now. What we usually expect to see, naively, hopefully, idealistically, is that all this stuff matters. Wrong. The average person, sadly, does not care about all this stuff very much at all. What the average person cares about is, almost always, over and above democracy itself, the nuts and bolts of it, its indicators of health, is…the economy.

That’s not just me lecturing you. It’s a sad truth of social science, and you can observe it as an empirical fact right now in America. Over and over again, people say that the economy is their number one concern. Sometimes, that’s mentioned as inflation, sometimes, as the cost of living, other times, as just the economy itself — doesn’t matter how we poll people, really, over and over again, the results are the same, because they’re always the same.