Why the Election is a Dead Heat, or The Laws of History vs America’s Future

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At this point, it’s a dead heat. The presidential election. 

It feels like Kamala and Tim should be doing better. There’s the idea that they’re “stalling.”  That momentum is shifting. The euphoria, perhaps, was momentary.

I write about this topic reluctantly now. It’s the province of pundits, perhaps. But let me explain quickly what’s going on here.

Why the Election is a Dead Heat

When we last discussed this, I said: America’s making history. Not repeating it. That was during the surge of enthusiasm, the euphoria, around Kamala and Tim’s historic nomination. An electricity was felt.

Making history, not repeating it. Why did I say that? Because in a nation as troubled as America, what we’d expect to see is the continued rise of the far right, and the collapse of democracy. Not at once, but in the way it has been, slowly, in a creeping way, institution by institution captured, from the Supreme Court to state legislatures and onwards.

Now. What I’m saying to you isn’t speculation, and it isn’t my opinion.

This is one of the basic facts of modern economics.

A finding that’s been repeated many times over is this. After economic crises and financial crashes, societies swing to the right. Predictably, and also proportionally. So the greater the crisis and crash, the harder and more violent the swing.

Why do I bring this up?

Trumpism and How Societies Collapse

Let’s think about the roots of Trumpism.

What happened just before Trump rose to power?

The Great Recession—the greatest financial crash and economic crisis since the Great Depression.

That predicted the rise of a far right movement in America. Again, this is social science. Not speculation. Predicted. We’re speaking now of historical forces, great and massive, like tides in the deep, deep ocean. Few societies can resist them.

And America wasn’t one of them. Right on cue, Trump rose to power. Enabled by a clueless media, or perhaps one altogether too comfortable with him, he won the Presidency. To the shock and dismay of the class of elites and pundits. But that puts paid to their ignorance of the basic facts of economics and history above: all this was predicted almost deterministically, in the same way that pressing down on a lever makes the other side rise.

Let’s think about now.

What’s happening at this moment? 

America’s elites and pundits won’t admit it—there’s the Shakespearean sense that they protest too much. But the economy is in dire shape.

The point isn’t what aggregate indicators say, like GDP and unemployment. Those can be debunked in a few words. Unemployment’s low, but full-time jobs are being destroyed—more than a million were lost last year, while part-time work is growing, as gig work and side hustles take their place. Most of these are in low-wage service work, meaning a middle-class life is unattainable. As a result, the lion’s share of GDP “growth” goes to the rich, who’ve gained absurd levels of fortune, earning trillions of capital income for essentially doing nothing.

The Widening Gulf Between Elites and People

The average American hence thinks the economy isn’t good. That sentiment’s so widespread that I won’t quote you any single poll—there are too many, they’re ubiquitous. And well over 50% of people will say that things are rough out there, that they’re struggling, that, no, the economy isn’t doing well at all.

That’s buttressed by a litany of statistics that I won’t recite again—you should know them by now, 80% of people living on the edge, 50% struggling to make ends meet, generations in downward mobility, fresh graduates unable to find suitable work, rising debt levels, etcetera.

So. Let’s go back to the finding. Again, not speculation, not opinion, but social science.

What does it tell us? The worse the economy, the harder the far right swing.

“Worse” here doesn’t mean what pundits and elites want to “debate,” how many angels dance on the head of a pin medieval style. It means what people actually think. How they actually feel. If they don’t feel good, this iron law takes effect.

That makes sense. They’re the ones living it after all. Elites have incredibly comfortable lives, and so do pundits. In a sense, they’re paid altogether too well for turning all this into a “debate,” but in history’s eyes, it isn’t one. When people think the economy is doing poorly, the far right will rise.

This is as close to a law of physics as there is in socioeconomic affairs. And pundits and elites do America a great disservice by denying it, ignoring it, minimizing it, because in this lies the only real strategy to combat the rise of fascism.

Political Economy in an Age of Collapse

Now. Let’s come to people and politics.

Why did Biden have to step aside? He lacked credibility. And that was chalked up to his age, by pundits and elites, but of course, Trump is just as old. So age was never the real factor here, not one bit. “Age” was a way of speaking of a lack of confidence and credibility from voters. And that lack of credibility happened because…

They’d constantly say the economy was great. Not just even mediocre, but that good. Meanwhile, people are facing this just titanic struggle. They can’t afford their homes, the cost of living’s out of control, educating a kid costs more than a house, and young people can’t afford those to begin with. 

The more that Biden would say the economy was good, the more his credibility would slide. Until, finally, he didn’t have much left.

Now. What’s the point I’m making?

This is a losing strategy. 

This is how fascism wins.

Recently, Edelman, which is a research group, has spoken of a phenomenon they call a “trust chasm.” Basically, they mean something like this: elites think things are going wonderfully well in this world of ours. But people don’t. As a result, people have lower and lower levels of trust in institutions and leaders.

When establishment institutions tell people things that aren’t true, what happens? They lose credibility. When they back them up with statistics that contain more noise than signal—GDP, unemployment, etc—and tell people that their lived experiences don’t matter, they lose even more credibility, faster. And when they remonstrate and scold people for not believing things are great, amidst struggles this historic, from the cost of living to climate change to attaining the basics of a middle class life, they lose whatever remaining shreds of credibility there were.

The Democrats have been on this path, and it almost cost them the election. When Biden was running, Trump would’ve won in a landslide.

Along came Kamala and TIm. Their nomination is historic, that’s true. And the euphoria was real, and the enthusiasm that’s still felt is, too.

But none of this is about that now.

The Iron Laws of History

This is about The Iron Laws of History. And the very first one, in the contemporary era, as I’ve explained to you, is simple: the worse the economy, people’s lived experiences of it, not just meaningless indicators, the harder and sharper the swing to authoritarianism and fascism.

I shouldn’t need to give you examples, which abound, from Weimar Germany, to Stalinist Russia.

This is now about that Iron Law of History.

The Democrats are now caught between a rock and a hard place. They need to speak the truth, do it fast, and do it well. The economy is not that great for the average person. People are struggling out there, and in historic ways. The middle class is dying. Young people are in dire, dire shape (remember, half of them feel numb.) Just being a parent is crushing (half of them feel overwhelmed with money worries, too.) 

None of this should be the case.

And none of this is about policy. The more Democrats get bogged down in policy, the more likely they are to lose. Policy comes a distant second to vision and emotion for the average person. People need to feel they’re being heard, being seen, and they need a vision which moves them. 

Policies are for pundits and elites to “debate,” and they don’t matter very much at all these days. If you can’t win, after all, and the far right surges, what good was that incredibly detailed policy agenda which pleased a bunch of white dudes with Ivy League degrees?

So to win, and make no mistake, this is about winning, parties, institutions, in this age, need to close the trust gap, or chasm, as Edelman calls it. And the only way they do that is by regaining the trust they’ve lost, which was lost by making the foolish mistake of telling people things are great, when nobody much feels that way.

That’s a tough needle to thread. But the Democrats need to wake up now, and do it.

The election is now slipping away from them.

The Iron Law of History is taking hold. It feels close to a depression for many people out there, and that predicts historic support for authoritarianism and fascism. This is why momentum feels as if it’s shifted. History is reasserting its immense power.

Will America repeat it, or make it? That much is up to all of us. To understand all the above. To really grasp it. To resist it, and make wiser choices. We must know, deep in our bones, how hard this struggle is. To make history is no small feat. In the absence of a true understanding of it, democracy will lose all over again, right now, as history…

Predicts.

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