There is nothing like inflation to expose the generation gap between those who lead the US and most of those who live in it.
The median American, who is not even 40, had no direct experience of high inflation until 2021. Their lives had coincided with the era of cheap Chinese imports and relative peace.
Biden, in contrast, as if he is in charge of a Rodeo, like other Washington eminences of a certain vintage (the swamp and its aged inhabitants) Biden might not fathom what a psychic trauma it is for the middle-aged and the young to see basic goods jump in price and savings deplete in value. .
Democrats point out that most of their interventionist ideas poll well. Must we go through this again? Policies that are popular on their own terms can be unpopular in combination. It is the impression of zeal, of pounding away at an ideological programme, that unnerves voters, unless they have sanctioned it in advance.
In cast of mind, the Democrats are less Marxist than most parties of the left. They tend not to believe that our species is on an ordained path towards something and (the more grandiose conceit) that we can somehow know where we are on that course. This is changing, though. Even mild US progressives now say, as though reading from some Hegelian flowchart, that we have come to the end of a stage called Neoliberalism and are proceeding neatly to the dialectical counterblast.
Even if you take such a clockwork view of history, I’d say just this. During the “neoliberal” era, the Republicans got drubbed at regular intervals – 1996, 2008, 2012 – for misreading the public demand for the market, notably with regard to healthcare and social security. In other words, it is possible to have the mood of the times broadly in your favour and still get too far in advance of it. Ask Paul Ryan. As fluent as he is on TV, this isn’t what he had hoped to be doing.
Democrats seem convinced the recent past was a Steinbeckian hellscape of downtrodden workers and cackling bosses. This not only trashes their own record – Clinton, Obama – but jars with public memory. The neoliberal age included low inflation. It needed reform, not rupture. Had Biden governed more modestly, it would be harder to frame him for high prices. There are water-treading presidencies and wave-making presidencies. To attempt the second with the mandate of the first is a mark of one-term presidencies. – The Financial Times
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