Acemoglu Agrees
At the risk of repeating myself …
I was made aware — via Tyler Cowan — of Daron Acemoglu’s view of the election result. I am glad I wrote much the same thing over the past few days. It is gratifying that the more august amongst us — signified in Acemoglu’s case his recent Nobel Prize — periodically express the same points.
Here’s the link for those of you who can stomach visiting Twitter — an especially difficult task given Elon Musk’s current shenanigans:
Let’s not dwell too long on this.
Here are sentences that resonate most strongly with me:
I feel anxious and saddened by Trump’s election. Years of turmoil and uncertainty await us. I have also come to believe that this is not Trump’s win. It is the Democrats who have lost this election
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Dems have ceased to be the workers’ party long ago, owing to their support for digital disruption, globalization, large immigrant flows, and “woke” ideas.
The transformation is really striking, as I have argued before: now it is the highly educated, not manual workers that vote for Democrats, and if the center-left does not become more pro-worker, it and democracy will suffer: https://project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-2024-democrats-must-return-to-working-class-priorities-policies-by-daron-acemoglu-2023-11
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The message was loud and clear in 2016, and all of the soul-searching that followed was healthy. It was part of the reason why Biden adopted a pro-worker industrial strategy.
Biden’s economy delivered for the working class in terms of jobs and strengthening the industrial base of the country. Wages at the bottom rose rapidly. Policy started moving towards the views of the American workers on immigration, protectionism, support for unions and public investment.
And yet, I fear that Dem activists and the establishment never fully internalized the woes of the workers and never made enough of an effort to bring them back to the fold. They sounded distant and detached.
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I fear that, now, Trump and Vance’s Republican Party will be the main home for workers, especially manufacturing workers and those in smaller cities.
I am saddened and fearful for the United States, and I am deeply saddened about the Democratic Party — unless this time it gets the message can truly change.
This is not just essential for the Democratic Party but for US democracy, which needs to refocus more on egalitarianism and voice for everybody, as I have argued recently: https://project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-eu-democracy-challenges-reflect-disappointing-economic-growth-and-wage-trends-by-daron-acemoglu-2024-06 and https://nytimes.com/2024/07/19/opinion/inequality-democracy-trump-solutions.html
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What is even more tragic is that the Trump-Vance policies are likely going to be for the plutocrats and not for the American workers.
Yes. I have quoted extensively. You can read the whole thing at your leisure.
As we sift through the debris of this election we must keep putting the result in a long term context. That is, I think, Acemoglu’s intention. We must avoid slipping into the comfortable zones of our own points of view. This is especially true for those who want to see the result solely through the prism of gender or race. Harris was not going to win the election regardless off either. Biden was simply too unpopular for her to make up the difference, and the Democratic Party had staked its future on ground alien to a majority of voters.
In short: the Democrats had simply stopped caring about issues of crucial importance to most voters. And this lack was long standing, not something remedied within a single presidential term. No matter how blue collar Joe Biden presented himself as, and no matter how beneficial his polices may turn out too be, the Democrats have become party of the educated elite and have lost empathetic touch with most voters.
Yes, issues of gender and race remain of great importance. That is undeniable. But they do not displace more urgent issues of day-to-day life. People have to feed, clothe, and provide homes for themselves before they begin to discuss those other culturally and socially significant issues.
The sad fact is that the Democrats have, in order to win elections over the past decades, absorbed the ideology of the neoliberal cause. They slipped into advocating Reaganism. This was, we were always told, what was necessary. To object was to be dismissed as being a crank. To resist was seen as immature. The grown-ups in the party led it firmly onto Reagan’s home turf. All you have to do to validate this historical narrative is to listen to the blistering criticism and scorn directed at Bernie Sander’s summary of why Harris lost. Tone deafness or shame, both inadequately describe the establishment’s immediate response to Bernie. Clearly it will take a while for the message to sink in.
I am repeating myself when I say: with the left in our national politics now defined by positions on gender and race rather than on economic class, constructing a large-scale winning majority in future elections has become more difficult. With the left now the province of well-educated and relatively prosperous lawyers, consultants, bankers, accountants, doctors, and other professionals and abetted by an academic cohort steeped in appropriate “wokeness”, the way back to a majority is both perilous and unlikely. The lack of shared experience and the segregation of our society into a self-referential elite and all the rest is too difficult to overcome.
All the posturing in the world cannot mask the hubris of the elite as it indulges in political correctness and culturally progressive activities, while the majority find it impossible to sustain, let alone improve, a basic standard of living.
It is a disaster for America that the puncturing of the elite’s dreamworld has been led by such a profoundly flawed person as Trump. That is, however, the price to be paid for the decades of complacency and self-enrichment of the erstwhile leftist elite.
They should have seen this coming.
That they did not — apparently — is all the more telling.
And, please, let’s not bemoan the loss of “democracy”. Trump’s win is a triumph for democracy: the majority have spoken. It has spoken loudly. His actions over the next few years are likely to shock and dismay us. But that is his mandate. He has been put in power to upend the security, safety, and, hopefully, the hubris of the educated elite. That entails deconstructing norms and structures held dear by that elite. And it includes disrespect for the very educated, technocratic, expertise that the elite so prides itself for possessing.
That elite that divided America into two very different economic spheres. That gap now needs to be closed.
It will be an uncomfortable process. It is also inevitable.
Trump is the wrong person to rebuild unity. He can only break apart the rottenness of the current economic segregation.
Reconstruction is the task of a re-conceived Democratic Party. One that is democratic in reality, not just in name.
