rodrik178_Jason Armond Los Angeles Times via Getty Images_trump supporters

The Democrats’ Four-Year Reprieve

Nov 9, 2020 Dani Rodrik

He may not know it yet, but the most important question US President-elect Joe Biden faces is how Donald Trump managed to win an even larger number of votes than he did four years ago, despite his lies, corruption, and disastrous handling of the pandemic. Unless he addresses it, a rude awakening awaits the Democratic Party in 2024.

CAMBRIDGE – As Joe Biden eked out a victory in the US presidential election after a few suspenseful days, observers of American democracy were left scratching their heads. Buoyed by polls, many expected a landslide for the Democrats, with the party capturing not only the White House but also the Senate. How did Donald Trump manage to retain the support of so many Americans – receiving an even larger number of votes than four years ago – despite his blatant lies, evident corruption, and disastrous handling of the pandemic?

The importance of this question goes beyond American politics. Center-left parties everywhere are trying to revive their electoral fortunes against right-wing populists. Even though Biden is temperamentally a centrist, the Democratic party platform has moved considerably to the left – at least by American standards. A decisive Democratic victory would have been a significant boost to the moderate left’s spirits: perhaps all it takes to win is to combine progressive economic policies with attachment to democratic values and basic human decency.

The debate is already on about how Democrats could have done better. Unfortunately, their narrow victory does not yield easy lessons. American politics revolves around two axes: culture and economics. On both sets of issues, we can find those who fault Democrats for going too far and those who fault them for not going far enough.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 22 in all 22 Comments on this article

Jonathan Lemieux Nov 16, 2020

After 4 yrs of calling Trump every name in the book (literally), after watching the prime time shows on TV hysterically cry night after night about how horrible he was, after 50 million investigations, an almost endless Special Council investigation, after a purely partisan, petty impeachment hearing, and so much more, it is not hard to see why so many Americans became numb to the outrage. How many Friday night headlines read "Trump's worst week"? Seriously, I saw that headline so often on the CNN weekend shows. Ever read the story of the boy who cried wolf? if you haven't you should, it will easily reveal to you why Trump came so close to winning re-election.

Trump did not blow the election cause if his "racist" "bigoted" "xenophobic" "homophobic" "sexist" comments, he blew it cause he acted like such a dope during the covid crisis. The American people did not vote against him cause of the media, they were numb to that. But it was Trump's own words at those daily press briefing he held early on during the crisis, his blatant refusal to wear a mask.

During his early yrs in office, I told friends that the media should shut up and let Trump fail on his own. And he would have. But because of the media's endless hysteria, every moronic antic he pulled was blamed on the media for "tripping him up". But he did not have that opportunity with Covid. He insisted on being the "wartime" president. He insisted on being the face of the Covid briefings, till his stupidity caught up with him. Comments like injecting bleach, saying he did not take responsibility. Watching the fatalities climb. Suggesting we should stop testing. He could not blame this on the media.

And the American people have judged him accordingly.
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Robert Ley Nov 15, 2020

Yes, surely the Democrats need "programmatic solutions". But to capture voters it has always been necessary, even more so now, to tell a good story. I would argue that this is a "third axis" of politics, one that encompasses the other two as it has to include both "culture" and "economics". What was Joe's story this year? "Trump's No Good."? That's a story based on verifiable facts and, as we know all too well, THE FACTS DON'T MATTER! The story matters. It's damn hard to build bridges to voters who are factually just plain wrong unless you can finesse the fact clash and tell a good story of inclusion that includes the voter in both cultural and economic ways.
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Per Kurowski Nov 15, 2020

Yes, the Democratic Party is in serious trouble. If you doubt it just ask yourself where it would be now without the anti-Trump vote?
In order to survive the democrats might need to ask Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC and their think alike comrades to set up separate quarters.
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Joe Ryan Nov 15, 2020

Prof. Rodrik says, "the burning question of our time" is, "Where will good jobs come from?" That's chasing an illusion.

Employment in capitalist firms will not, by its nature, provide employees with income sufficient to buy their basic needs, for five unavoidable reasons.

(1) Recessions.
(2) Labor-saving mechanization.
(3) Shifts in demand between sectors.
(4) Churn between individual firms.
(5) Employers' success in pushing wages down in order to increase profits.

"Employment," from the point of view of firms, is part of getting production done. From the point of view of the public interest, it is that plus a method of distributing income for basic needs. For the latter purpose, it's a kludge that doesn't and can't work adequately.

Social insurance needs to pick up the provision of income to purchase basic needs (while also the public sector acts to ensure the provision of the basic needs are public goods).

Employment income is suitable for providing the non-necessities that everyone wants.
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George Fallis Nov 15, 2020

Dani Rodrik is two-thirds correct in writing: "American politics revolves around two axes: culture and economics." American politics also revolves around a third axis: race.
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Andrés Galia Nov 15, 2020

This paragraph is a real joke and is the best example on how the establishment of the Democratic party keeps watching their own navel. Just have a look on how the Gini index moved even during Democrats years in office. As somebody put it, Trump was the wrong answer to valid concerns from a lot of people. The Democratic party would have moved to the left if instead of Hillary Clinton the party had nominated Sanders in 2016. But in the US it is not the political parties that rule the country but the financial sector.

The myth to which the article refers, the lone entrepreneur who does best when government does the least, is the root of the problem and the pandemic has shown why it is a myth, which is fueled by the people that defends the status quo; i.e., their privileges.
- Robert Ley Nov 16, 2020
  
  This is an old, but no less valid, observation. It matches very nicely my feeling that the Dems need to stop navel-gazing, quit their damn identity politics, and tell a good story. For a much better understanding of how/why we continue to be bamboozled by this story, see "Evil Geniuses" by Kurt Andersen, a terrific history of the Neocon/libertarian takeover (or reiteration if you prefer) of our national narrative. I disagree that it's all about privilege. I'm not sure the Neocons/Libertarians were "evil", just WRONG. As Andersen admits, we ALL got fooled. Time to admit it and move on with a better, more inclusive, story.
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Keith Roberts Nov 12, 2020

I agree with Rodrik. From my perspective, however, there is both good and bad news about healing the gulf between red and blue Americans. The good news is that the mesmerizing Mr. Trump's hold on red America is largely personal. His vaunted "base" seems to respond to the images he embodies and very skillfully communicates, not to any particular group of programs, policies, or ideology. With his loss of the bully pulpit I suggest the appeal of Trumpism will fade. The bad news is that the with modern communication technology and the media genius of Rupert Murdoch and his imitators on the far right, half the country will still be constantly bombarded with falsehoods and propaganda. The facts and reasoning of one side hardly reach the other. And I think that until we can solve this problem, even without Trump the possibility of making progress together will remain slim.
- Robert Ley Nov 16, 2020
  
  Amen. But it's NOT ABOUT THE FACTS! It's about the story. What's the Dems story?? Remember: You don't have to win over everyone, just enough people to tilt the scale.
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Robert Johnston Nov 12, 2020

In this age of inexorable, mass automation of agriculture and manufacturing, supporting unsustainable mass consumption, reworking the small city/town/rural life style is key to support a new quality of life, and going to be very hard, not least in the face of the pandemic, and will require a lot of new thinking, new, unconventional investment , and a lot of income and health services support.
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WmC Mantis Nov 12, 2020

L. Randall Wray has been pushing the idea of a government job guarantee for more than twenty years. He (and others) has outlined how such a guarantee would work in practice. On its face, it's an idea that should appeal to both liberals and conservatives. Why the idea has not gained traction---especially in Democratic circles---is a complete mystery to me.
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j. von Hettlingen Nov 12, 2020

Dani Rodrik is right about Joe Biden’s daunting task of solving the country’s most pressing problems - a ravaging pandemic, a faltering economy and a deeply divided nation. Only if he is willing to address the issues that helped Trump win an even larger number of votes than he did four years ago, “despite his blatant lies, evident corruption, and disastrous handling of the pandemic,” would he be able to avoid “a rude awakening” that could await the Democrats in 2024.
Biden won, but he was expected to win more resoundingly. Last week’s true, dark-horse winner was Trumpism, and it should serve as a repudiation of Biden and the Democrats, who have been torn apart by ideology. Critics fear that even with Trump’s defeat, embers of his political movement that has taken total control of the Republican Party could still be burning for a while. It would be naïve to believe that politics will be better in the post-Trump era.
Democrats need to address white grievances over the nation’s demographic changes with fierce rejection of liberal elites and global engagement. Trumpism has united millions under the impulses and ideas of one man: Trump. It is possible that it faces volatility and a political vacuum once he leaves office. If history is anything to go by, the GOP has seen how George Wallace’s racist movement, Perot’s movement and a Tea Party movement, all faded when they lacked a leader or had a diminished leader.
The author says with the rise of right-wing populism, “center-left parties everywhere are trying to revive their electoral fortune.” Although Biden is “temperamentally a centrist,” his party platform “has moved considerably to the left… by American standards. A decisive Democratic victory would have been a significant boost to the moderate left’s spirits: perhaps all it takes to win is to combine progressive economic policies with attachment to democratic values and basic human decency.”
As critics say Democrats “could have done better…..their narrow victory does not yield easy lessons. American politics revolves around two axes: culture and economics. On both sets of issues, we can find those who fault Democrats for going too far and those who fault them for not going far enough.” The cultural divide between social conservatives in white, rural areas and liberals in urban centres is growing. The former defends family values and gun rights, while opposing abortion. The latter backs progressive issues like, moral values, social justice, racial equality, abortion and same-sex marriage.
Trump had capitalised on this summer’s street protests to sell himself as a law-and-order president, taking votes away from Democrats, who have been seen as “soft” on violent demonstrators. Some voters resent Democrats for “tarring the nation as a whole with the broad brush of racism.” Socially liberal but fiscally conservative voters feel the Democratic party turned them off “by moving too far to the left,” enabling Republicans to instil “the fears of high taxes, job-killing environmental policies, and socialized medicine.”
The ravaging pandemic has taken a toll on economic activities. While Trump has utterly failed to manage the health crisis, ordinary Americans fear more stringent measures to contain the virus. The author says, “in both major US political parties, the quintessential American myth of the lone entrepreneur who does best when government does the least is still alive and well.” In a poll many voters said they worry more about the economy than about the pandemic.
How Democrats are going to grapple with the challenges ahead of them will be crucial for their chance to remain in power in 2024. Biden has been able to regain the votes of the white working class in America’s industrial heartland, because he brandishes his blue-collar roots and middle-class image. Democrats and “parties of the left have increasingly become the parties of educated, metropolitan elites, who, “incapable of understanding and empathizing with the worldviews of the less fortunate,” are said to have neglected the working class voters.
The author says,“good, middle-class jobs are becoming scarce, owing to secular trends in technology and globalization. And COVID-19 has deepened the polarization of labor markets. We need a more proactive government strategy directly targeting an increase in the supply of good jobs.” It also raises the question of how to finance such an ambitious agenda? “Is there appetite for “more progressive taxation,” without which “investments in education and infrastructure” may just well be hot air?
No doubt universal health insurance is a pressing issue, given the number of Covid-19 deaths. Widespread drug addictions and family breakdown lead to mental health problems and crime surge. “People become more attached to traditional values, less tolerant of outsiders, and more willing to support authoritarian strongmen. Economic insecurity triggers or aggravates cultural and racial fault lines.”
Much of America’s social problems are the result of decades long callous Republican policy, and Democrats have failed to offer “programmatic solutions to these deep-rooted economic problems.” Yet the bigger challenge is to bridge the the cultural divide, that has been exacerbated by identity politics, for which the author blames Democrats. If left unadressed they might see the rise of someone far worse than Trump in 2024.
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Prashant Kotak Nov 9, 2020

"...We need a more proactive government strategy directly targeting an increase in the supply of good jobs..."

Well sure. But sticking plasters. Which will last perhaps not even five years, much less fifteen or fifty. And more structurally, will last less time than it will take to actually devise such strategies and get them enacted. Because the missing piece is this: the very same types of people will be engaged in creating such strategies, as will be engaged in creating workarounds to those precise same strategies, through accountancy, law, economics, regulations, and the 900-lb gorilla: TECHNOLOGY. So you have multiple revolving doors between high-education, high-skill metro-orientated people on every side of this equation, which are inaccessible, in fact completely hidden, from the large numbers of left-behinds who cannot understand why the secure ground they had known is shifting under their feet as though turned to sand. Because face it, while humans can outrun other humans, they cannot outrun technology.
- Michael Public Nov 10, 2020
  
  "they cannot outrun technology"
  AI driven automation will slowly (or not so slowly) make this worse - coming to almost every industry is some kind of AI that will have a big impact - for some - a catastrophic impact. The two most common jobs in the US are 'driver' and 'retail worker' - and these two jobs have already been 'solved' at a prototype level - it is only a question of mass producing self driving vehicles and of rolling out Amazon go systems at scale. Then you will see the sand really shift under peoples feet and the abyss suck them in.
  - Prashant Kotak Nov 10, 2020
    
    Very much agree. My fear is that the disappearance of retail and driving jobs will cause another mini employment cliff-edge in as little as half a decade, potentially as bad as that induced by the lockdowns, but permanent this time. And on the two decade horizon, the same trends encroaching deeply into educated office work and potentially even the creative space.
    - Robert Ley Nov 16, 2020
      
      All true, but those can be solved with appropriate policies. We will at some point have to address our Protestant aversion to paying people who don't work, because there won't be work for them! Appropriate policies can be formed IF the Dems can come up with a story that allows ALL Americans to feel good about it and also to feel like it's still their country, too. No story-->No policies-->No support.
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Mark Foster Nov 9, 2020

Dear Professor Rodrik,

I would appreciate your consideration of a future essay or reference list to elaborate on a sentence in your concluding paragraph, "A lot of bridge building needs to be done to overcome the fissures for which cultural elites are largely responsible".

It's not hard to concur with "a lot of bridge building needs to be done to overcome fissures".

It is not clear to me who you include in your "cultural elite" group and what fissures do you attribute to their actions/in-action.

Any elaboration you can provide on these points would be greatly appreciated.

Very best regards. Thank you for your work and taking the time to provide these brief essays.
- Robert Ley Nov 16, 2020
  
  For a discussion of "meritocratic hubris" (AKA elites making fissures) read Sandel's "The Tyranny of Meritocracy" or watch one of the YouTubes in which he discusses the book. Andersen's "Evil Geniuses" is a more lengthy look at how the divide was created and maintained by the Neocon/Libertarian wing.
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- Michael Public Nov 10, 2020
  
  "Bridge building" One can only sit and imagine what needs to be done. Off the top of my head:
  
  1. A two year compulsory community service for every American between (say) 17 and 27. Your community service is never in your own community but in a community most different from your own.
  
  2. Establishment of some kind of truth reporting press - as apposed to a clicks/views driven press. They would have to funded by a tax but completely free of government. They should be able to 'commandeer' (say 10% of) space from any other media platform.
  
  3. Remove barriers that make it difficult to move to a new area for a new job. For example, banks should not charge mortgage cancellation fees if you refinance with them, no house 'transfer duties' etc. Similar things for apartment rentals.
  
  4. Allow states more autonomy on emotional issues (e.g. abortion, gun control, gay marriage and immigration) if they are a red state. What does a New Yorker care if abortions are illegal in Idaho? 99.32% will never even go there in their entire life time - far fewer will ever live there. Mutatis mutandis for heavy blue states.
  
  5. Allow states and cities the right to essentially raise product tariffs or issue selective business licenses - these are not great things in general - but when the only factory in town which makes autos leaves for Mexico it is only fair that selling those exact same cars into the town comes with strings attached - like a certain amount of local jobs - or some other quid pro quo. The greater US does this to protect themselves, so why cant smaller regions do the same? Why does much of America just simply have to accept Detroitification of their economy?
  
  6. Make every vote count in the presidential and house votes. Abolish all kinds of gerrymandering including the most poisonous - the electoral college.
  
  7. Major investment into redeveloping some key areas left dead by outsourcing and automation. Why do Tesla and Amazon get to decide which city they will move to? How about funding a new megacity mid America - a military, educational and tech center to rival SF. They Chinese did it very easily with Shenzen - the US can follow suit.
  - Robert Ley Nov 16, 2020
    
    GREAT suggestions! AMEN.
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Gareth Owen Nov 9, 2020

Democratic party has moved to "wall street" and Republican party is now "main street". The elites have forgotten the working family & family in general and see more value in a 1/2 degree cooling of the planet than 1/2 percent increase in wages and putting food on the table. Free this, free that, doesn't solve the problem; just the opposite - it makes the problem worst. President Trump is abrasive, is hated by the Left, but is correct, career politicians and the elite don't care about "you" and will do anything to grab or hold onto power. It isn't 2024 the Democrats need to worry about, its 2022. Remember the Tea Party, they still believe in the ideals of the Republican Party. The Progressives, Socialist, etc. use the Democratic party to get elected but don't care about the Democratic party traditional ideals. President elect Biden knows this & hence he is worried about 2022 and Georgia on Jan 5th, 2021.
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Bernhard Kopp Nov 9, 2020

Obviously, I do not know a magic bullet. What I understand the least is why it is considered agreeable, by Mr. Bezos and the Washington elite, that some 1 million hourly employees of Amazon get paid $ 15.- per hour, which hardly anywhere, and definitely not in the large metropolitan regions, is a living wage. On the other hand, neither the internet trade, nor the shipping and handling services that are required for it, would suffer economically if the average wage were double the amount actually paid. The same applies to tens of millions of workers in various service industries. Servide industries cannot " move the factories " to Mexico or China. Conceivably, growth of a number of businesses would be slower, commercial rents might be lower on average, but it need not be damaging to the economy overall. In addition to the wages at the lower end of the income scale, affordable health insurance and affordable care seem to be the single largest problem. If Democrats cannot convince the people that Switzerland, with a fairly good universal health insurance and health care system, is not a communist country, or a Venezuela, not even a chaotic mess, then they will continue to have a statistical life expectancy of some 60 years in poor districts, and 90 years in wealthy districts, sometimes only a few miles apart.
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