With inflation through the roof and the economy on the brink of recession, voters have more important things to worry about than relitigating 2020.
With inflation through the roof and the economy on the brink of recession, voters have more important things to worry about than relitigating 2020.
T here may be no more vivid example of the bewilderment with which America’s rank-and-file journalists tend to process quotidian American politics than the complaint that voters seem more interested in our unfolding economic catastrophe than they do in following the machinations of the January 6 committee.
At CNN, Stephen Collinson notes that “polls repeatedly show that voters see the economy – a far more visceral issue in daily life than the threat to American democracy – as their top concern.” He’s right: voters do “see” the economy this way. And they are rational to do so, too, given that inflation is causing havoc in the United States, in a way that Donald Trump — who is not on the ballot in 2022 — is not. On the one hand, we have a “committee” that has “transfixed Washington”; on the other, we have “a nation still struggling to shake off the deprivations of a once-in-a-century pandemic and coping with raging inflation and growing fears of a recession.” Which of these did Collinson expect to dominate our political conversations nearly two years after January 6?
That is a rhetorical question. It’s also a question that President Biden and his party would do well to ask themselves in earnest. For nearly two years now, the Democrats and the press have treated inflation as if it were a mere distraction — to be managed with words instead of actions, so that political room could be created to do other things. But that is not how politics works. “By one measure,” Collinson writes, “the cost-of-living index returned to its highest level since August 1982 last month.” The signs of this are everywhere — at the pump, in the rental listings, in the car market, in the price of milk. “It would be too simplistic to say voters are more preoccupied with the cost of French fries than the price of democratic freedoms,” Collinson adds, and yet “it wouldn’t be far from the mark.” This should be obvious. In essence, Collinson is lamenting that Americans are too worried about the cost of food — in particular, about the cost of potatoes, the most historically fraught menu item in the Western world. Again: Even if we were to take his unrelated assumptions about “democratic freedoms” at face value, what did he expect?
We shouldn’t take those assumptions at face value. Collinson complains that “this year’s tumultuous campaign is most notable for other issues that have overtaken the shockwaves of the assault on the Capitol only 21 months ago.” This, though, seems to be cutting both ways. Many voters are, indeed, unwilling to credit the Democratic Party’s self-serving insistence that, if it doesn’t do well in November’s midterms, democracy itself will be dead. But many of those same voters also seem uninterested in Donald Trump’s attempts to relitigate the election of 2020. In Georgia, Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger — the two most frequent Republican targets of Trump’s 2020-related ire — are showing that focusing on the present pays greater political dividends than does catering to the ravings of a madman. Why are Americans more concerned about inflation than about the catastrophic prognostications of the partisan press and its ersatz counterparts in MAGA-world? Because, sensibly enough, they believe that only one of those problems is real.
One should not require polls to intuit this. To this day, I have never heard a normal person say that they are worried about “our democracy.” But inflation? Its discussion is ubiquitous. Irrespective of their political preferences, or their general interest in discussing current affairs, Americans now talk about it relentlessly. They talk about it in bars. They talk about it at the supermarket-checkout line. They talk about it at family gatherings. Over the weekend, I attended a birthday party in honor of one of my son’s friends, and it took precisely five minutes for the cost of goods to come up in the parents’ small talk. The Jacksonville Jaguars, the baseball postseason, the damage Hurricane Ian had done to our local beach, and inflation — those were our topics. The issue is in the national bloodstream. It’s the subject of our complaints, our observations, our chit-chat, and our gallows humor. For the first time since the early 1980s, inflation jokes are en vogue, and universally comprehended. Wherever one roams, there is no escape from it. It’s not a part of the zeitgeist; it is the zeitgeist. And french fries ain’t the half of it.