Brian Beutler argues today in his newsletter (subscribe here) that even though the media has belatedly begun to acknowledge the booming Biden economy, we live in a world where there are too many people with vested interests in denying to allow Biden to have a “Morning In America” validation:
Even as the mainstream press comes around, there are more than enough individuals and institutions with a rooting interest in denying the health of the economy to keep economic perceptions anchored way below where they’d be under a Republican president. Indeed, it would be remarkable if sentiment pokes above water before the year is out.
If you’re wondering why I think that, here’s a rough-and-ready taxonomy of the doomsayers.
THE REPUBLICAN GRASSROOTS
I’m thinking of millions of partisan voters, mostly anonymous, who are so invested in GOP politics or movement conservatism or even just Donald Trump that they interpret Democratic rule as coterminous with apocalyptic decline. They huff right-wing media for hours a day. Their identities are wrapped up in their disdain for liberals, big cities, Hollywood, and the mainstream media. They can’t fathom the country succeeding under the opposing party so they assume it must be spiraling downward along every conceivable dimension. Sadly, these kinds of Republicans comprise the great majority of GOP voters. There are Democrats who have an equal-and-opposite worldview, but their numbers are lopsidedly small. When Donald Trump became president consumer sentiment among Democrats dipped slightly but spiked among Republicans. When Biden beat him, Democratic sentiment improved quite a bit, but Republican sentiment collapsed.
REPUBLICAN CYNICS
These are conservatives and professional propagandists who know the truth, but understand the value of misleading the public in big ways and small—if all they can do is tell a pollster they think the economy is a disaster, when they know that’s not true, that’s what they’ll do. If they have enough clout to spread false gloom to low-information voters, they’ll do that, too. This category includes scores of party elites, but I’m thinking especially of Steve Bannon, Fox News anchors (particularly in primetime), the Trump family, Elon Musk, etc. Between these first two categories, we’re already edging close to half the country.
ONLINE WRECKERS
There’s surely overlap between Republican cynics and online wreckers, but here I’m thinking less of official and unofficial party operatives, and more of a diffuse set of content makers with bad motives. Clout-seeking doomsayers who know that spreading free-floating misery is a recipe for viral traffic; influencers in realms like fitness where showing disdain for all things Biden is an entry point to selling supplements (or investment tips or whatever); leftists who want to crush liberalism, even at the cost of returning Trump to power; armies of trolls who are excited about returning Trump to power; megarich tech and finance bros, but I repeat myself.
If you ever express anything remotely positive about the economy online—particularly about macroeconomic data—you will encounter one or all subspecies of online wreckers. They spread conspiracy theories about official data being cooked. They mock the idea that data, even if gathered ethically, can tell us anything more valuable than anecdotal impressions of the national economy or “lived experiences.” There’s a secret depression. Eggs and Big Macs are more expensive now, even though eggs haven’t been expensive for over a year and you bought that Big Mac on DoorDash. Their meta-method isn’t just to say they haven’t enjoyed the spoils of the recovery, but to make observing the reality of the recovery seem deeply uncool. I don’t suspect that there are many online wreckers in absolute terms, but they dominate economic discourse on social media, where most Americans get at least some information.
LEFTY MATERIALISTS AND LIBERAL QUANTS
I’m lumping these two groups together because their approaches are similar, though their ideologies differ. The former essentially believe—for perfectly justifiable reasons!—that the U.S. economy has never been good or just. For them, a mismatch between sentiment and macro data represents the first time in memory that the numbers have made sense. And because they believe politics is downstream from material conditions, they go looking for material explanations of unusual political phenomena, even if it means reaching much deeper into the data than could possibly be useful. The scholar Tyler Austin Harper wrote, “Many middle-class people want to buy a house and cannot afford to [] buy a house in this economy. An economy where many gainfully employed middle-class people can’t buy a house is not a good economy, no matter what the pie charts say.” It’s true: many middle-class people who want homes can’t afford them. Also true: This has been the case for a long time now, including through periods when economic sentiment was sky high.
Liberal quants have much more faith in the macro data. So much so that they believed the correlation between GDP growth and incumbent political success was something like an iron law. Biden’s poor standing amid a historic boom unsettles them, and so they’ve taken to revising their theories with epicycles. Perhaps a heretofore undiscovered lag effect keeps sentiment mired in the doldrums after a period of inflation? Perhaps people remember 2020 fondly because of all the stimulus money they had (while stuck in their homes for months on end)?
You’d think these validators of discontent would be more responsive to straightforward refutations of their insights: Last time inflation was high it did not generate this much economic despair, let alone for over a year after inflation ended; last time interest rates were at this level people thought the economy was good. It’s easier for young Americans to buy homes now than it was just a few years ago, when economic sentiment was extremely high. The economy is stronger now than it was prior to the pandemic, but sentiment is much, much worse. Etc etc.
Nevertheless, they persisted.
SALESPEOPLE
These people aren’t acting with obvious political or ideological motives. They just want people to spend their money, and think the best way to do this is with a “we feel your pain” appeal to the collective sense that things are expensive and it’s harder than usual to get by.
We are living in a whiny, outrage culture driven by social media, Donald Trump, pissed off liberals, right wing grievance fetishists. And we are still recovering from the pandemic which knocked us for a loop. So I think Beutler has a point. On the other hand, most people get tired of negativity after a while and want some relief. I think that may be in play as well. Unfortunately, that may not come until after the election. If Trump wins he will get credit for it which is just too much to bear.