Oct 3, 2024 8 min read

The Election’s Central Question Is Here

I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

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The central focus of the election’s coming into view.

Are Americans willing to trade democracy and a modern society for the economy? Maybe “sacrifice” is a better word.

On the one side, there’s Trump, and on the other, Kamala. And by now, the choice before America couldn’t be clearer.

How I Feel Watching the Democrats

Sadly, all this is turning more or less exactly as I predicted.

The Democrats haven’t been able to craft a compelling message on the Number One Issue, the economy. For a very simple reason. One which beggars belief. They appear genuinely not to understand, or even want to understand, or even be open to the possibility that they’re wrong. Things aren’t great for most people. They’re pretty dire.

Now, we’ve gone through all that before, so let me share with you how it feels watching this prediction of mine come true.

It’s awful. I watch the Democrats every day, and I want to shake them by the shoulders. Scold them. Shout at them.

How can you guys not get it, I wonder. Yes, we all know that the most crude statistics say things are OK. But dig just a scratch beneath those, and you get to the stuff of serious social disrepair. 70% living on the edge, the majority struggling to pay the bills, parents and kids “numb” and overwhelmed. Distress and trauma are how Americans live, even if they sort of grin and bear it, and we’ll come back to that.

Those aren’t remotely the statistics of anything resembling a healthy society, or normal times. This is stuff we’d associate with times of serious turmoil, from depressions to wars. The majority of people feeling this bad?

But the Democrats aren’t even just clueless. They’re worse than that. They’re resistant to understanding just how clueless they are. To not know a thing is fine, you can learn it, and be taught. But to not know a thing, and then say that not knowing it doesn’t matter, that you know better—what do we even call that?

Willful ignorance, perhaps. Blindness, maybe.

Institutions do this. It’s called inertia, a lack of vision, an inability to engage with realities outside their shared consensus.

But seeing the Democrats do it over and over and over, every single day, it makes me want to scream, to be honest. How, I wonder, can you be this foolish?

Have we ever once in history seen authoritarian movements arise when times are good? Of course not. From Caesar to Hitler, history’s message is direct and clear.

So do these folks not even care to read history? Do they not know it? Do they not listen to any of the warnings?

Are they that ignorant?

Or are they just uninterested?

Do they just want to win the election, and then forget about the issues, as they’ve done before? And even if that’s the case…LOL…they’re not winning it.

It makes me…angry is the wrong word. Disappointed isn’t strong enough. Just sort of exasperated with the lethal stupidity of it, but beyond that, sort of bewildered at the utter futility of it.

Trying to get the Democrats to engage with reality, so they can win.

I’m not even their super fan, a card carrying member.

It’s a fool’s errand, and that’s why they’re losing, and yet there they are, stumbling around in the dark, baffled, unable to grasp any of it, history, the economy, society, people, how societies rise and fall, and worse, if you try to teach them, they’ll slap you in the face, for daring to question them.

It’s all so profoundly idiotic I’m sort of stunned on a daily basis.

I know that sounds harsh, but let’s be fair: nobody should be losing this election to Donald Trump, and we all know that.

Yet the reason why is right before everyone’s eyes, and people keep on saying it over and over and over and over and over again: the economy, stupid. But the more they do, the tighter the Dems jam their fingers in their ears, and bellow right back: things are great, you fools, why don’t you listen!!

This is how you lose to Donald Trump.

“Maybe He Doesn’t Really Mean It”

Now let’s come to Trump.

Americans trust Trump on the economy more, which we should all understand is ridiculous, absurd, and terrible, given that he’s literally a convicted fraudster. It’s the stuff of black comedy, reality meeting satire and being kicked by it squarely in the teeth.

I say that as someone who’s gotten more sympathetic to Trump. Over the years, I’ve softened. Or maybe I’ve hardened. These days, I have to admit, that the idea that of stopping jobs from going offshore to places where they’re turned into neoserfdom—that’s something I like. I think our societies have a wave of low-skill immigration, which has consequences.

I know many of you won’t like to hear that, but I’m not the leftist or super liberal that people sometimes think I am, which is why I constantly warn of just that. Yes, I believe in public goods, equality, justice, truth. Democracy.

And this is where things get tricky.

Americans, at least many of them, who support Trump, right now, half-heartedly—so not the MAGA fanatics—appear to be willing to engage in a little bit of self-deceit. Self-delusion. Hey, he doesn’t really mean it, they say, and they’ll say it out loud, often, to interviewers or pollsters.

He doesn’t mean it when he says he’s going to be a dictator, when he says he’s going to purge the government and install loyalists, when he’s going to send the military combing through every town for the unwanted, when he says he’s going to cleanse society.

The same is true of JD Vance. Hey, he doesn’t mean it when he says he’s against IVF, or that women are just baby-carriers, or whatever creepy and weird and crazy thing it is lately.

He doesn’t mean it.

I think we should all take a moment to understand where these folks are coming from.

We all engage in self-delusion and self-deceit. We do it for noble reasons, often, and I don’t think people like this are doing it for bad reasons. I think they’re doing it for good ones.

They want better lives. They’re focused on the economy. To people in this group, the economy is far and away Issue Number One, and as we’ve discussed, Trump’s message is far more compelling, because it’s credible, since he begins with the truth that things are rough out there, which JD Vance said out loud during the debate, referencing the fading of the Dream.

So. People are willing to lie to themselves a little bit, just to believe: hey, maybe these guys actually care about us. See, they get it. They’re the ones who recognize that things are tough, that times are rough, that we should’ve had a fairer shake. The Democrats don’t ever say that, and so we can’t really trust them on the economy.

And if these guys are trustworthy on the economy, which is Issue Number One, to us…then maybe…then maybe they’re not that crazy. They don’t really mean it when they say all the other crazy stuff. Who wants to take away IVF? Abortion? Who cares what crackpots think of what books are in which libraries? That stuff doesn’t have much to do with the economy. They probably don’t mean it.

Nobody that sane on the issue I care about most, who I can trust, would be that crazy on everything else.

This is how you get to they-don’t-really-mean-it. It’s not just a cognitive bias, but something much, much deeper. A need to believe in this person who appears to genuinely care about you and the state of your life, which is something that Americans haven’t had in a very, very long time now. When someone appears to genuinely care about you, in the ways that you’ve been hurt and neglected in the past, you can excuse a little bit of crazy, because this kind of care feels so powerful, and dismiss it as just words. This is exactly how, in fact, abusive relationships begin.

The Election’s Central Question

And yet we all know that they probably do mean it. Is JD Vance the polite college boy he portrayed himself at the debate, or is he really going to try and take away people’s IVF, women’s rights, minorities’ freedoms? If history’s any guide, and it usually is, I think we can all make a fairly good guess what happens next. Meanwhile, Trump himself of course has a long history of abuse of power, and that points squarely to more in the future.

This is the maddening thing about it, in a way, that this group of people are still asking if they really mean it, and sort of answering the question in a vague but-they-can’t kind of way.

But it’s understandable. When you’ve been neglected for so long, and someone finally sees you, that’s an incredibly powerful thing. You dismiss the darker sides of their personality. This is what’s happening in America.

All of which brings me back to the central question.

Are Americans willing to sacrifice democracy and a modern society for “the economy”? This time, I put it in quotes, for a reason. Look, on that score, things are sort of a wash. Kamala’s plans are OK, nice in principle, but not nearly big or visionary enough to yield a real paradigm shift. Trump’s plans…there aren’t many, and that in a way is OK, because at least America can get back to doing what it does best, which is capitalism, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

So in that sense, from the perspective of the economy, there are differences, to be sure, but it’s not as if Kamala’s proposing a New Deal, and Trump’s proposing a libertarian revolution. It’s slightly softer predatory capitalism versus even maybe a slightly different, more nationalist sort of still pretty predatory capitalism.

The big difference is in what Americans are willing to overlook, or at least a lot of them are. And here, the choice is a kind of idiotic one. At least they’re not the fascists. One side has a long, long history by now of wanting to undo democracy, and actually doing it. The other side doesn’t have a very good history of expanding democracy, or even protecting it, but hey, at least they’re not the…

You get the point.

Not a very inspiring choice. And it saddens me and infuriates me to not see the Democrats really getting any of this.

Hey, my friends tell me, this is what you predicted, and here it is, unfolding just as you said. The Democrats are struggling to beat Trump, because they’re sort of trapped in mediocrity and fumbling around in the dark.

That doesn’t make me feel good.

Once in a while, I’d like institutions and leaders to understand my predictions as warnings. Not things that have to come true. But ones which shouldn’t.

How I Feel Watching the Democrats

“Maybe He Doesn’t Really Mean It”

The Election’s Central Question

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