What happens when the electorate stops listening to elites?
Voters no longer accept the claims made by either politicians or journalists. Why could that be?
Image courtesy of DALL-E
Donald Trump is leading President Biden in six of the seven most competitive states in the 2024 election… a new Wall Street Journal poll finds… Trump holds double-digit leads in every state when voters are asked who can best handle the economy, inflation and immigration… the electorate is highly unsettled. About one-quarter of voters are either undecided or back third-party and independent candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr… the survey also found an unusual dynamic: Voters say the national economy is in bad shape but conditions in their home states are generally good.
The Wall Street Journal, 2/4/24
If the nine most terrifying words in the English language for fans of the free market are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” the five most terrifying words for an incumbent PM or President must be, “The voters have stopped listening.”
If you’re a connoisseur of political journalism, you’ll be aware that this phase tends to be deployed in specific circumstances – usually when a tired government has outstayed its welcome. The problem facing a government in this situation is not so much that voters have stopped believing its claims; it’s that they’ve been disappointed so many times that they no longer even bother paying much attention to those claims other than to mock them.
I was reminded of this phenomenon after reading the reader comments at the bottom of a recent Sydney Morning Herald article.
(Before proceeding further, I should make clear I’m using this particular story and the journalist who wrote it to illustrate a broader issue. I’ve long read and occasionally written for the Fairfax/Nine papers, and I enjoy Shane Wright’s columns and Insiders’ contributions.)
From demographic decline to a public pile-on
On 28/3/24, the Nine papers published an article entitled ‘Forget sky-high migration, Australia’s got bigger population problems’ by senior economics correspondent Shane Wright. In the article Wright argues, correctly in my view, that Australians should be paying far more attention to the threat of mass depopulation, especially in those Asian nations Australia’s economy is now enmeshed with.
If he’d had just left it there, I imagine his article would have received a positive response. But like most individuals who move in culturally upper-middle class circles (I emphasise the ‘cultural’ qualifier – I assume Wright isn’t pulling down the big bucks and, if he is, he’s very much the exception among today’s newspaper journos), Wright is dismissive of those who’ve expressed concern about immigration.
His article’s opening sentence sets the tone, “The minute the Australian Bureau of Statistics released its latest report on population growth last week, the usual offenders got worked up, hand-wringing over immigrants and claiming Australia is ‘full’.”
As our academic friends say, let’s deconstruct the text.
You don’t need a PhD in semiotics to discern Wright is contemptuous of the growing number of Australians concerned about unprecedented levels of immigration. In Wright’s opinion, they are hysterical bedwetters who jump on any statistic they can to raise doubts about the wisdom of Australia’s current immigration policy. Which is, it goes without saying, beyond reproach.
The statistic in question – the materialisation of 659,800 new Australians, 80 per cent of them migrants, over 12 months – represents “the biggest one year increase since Robert Menzies was prime minister in 1952,” as Wright himself notes.
For what it’s worth, I agree with many of Wright's core arguments. But I get the impression nobody, with the possible exception of me, paid much attention to the claims Wright was advancing about demographic changes. Instead, Wright’s disproportionately well-educated and well-heeled readership hammered him for his airy dismissals of immigration sceptics.
Wright’s article attracted 516 responses before the comments were closed. Based on a quick skim read, 99.9 per cent of commentators took Wright to task. Here’s the first comment that appears, from ‘Xenial Andante’:
Forget about what ordinary Australians think, the traffic jams, parking problems and overcrowded public transport. Think about the welfare of the developers and the wonderful quality of life for those living in cities like Shanghai, Mexico City and Jakarta.
Indeed, readers of Wright’s article – and, to reiterate, this is the demographic that would be expected to be most relaxed about immigration – were so outraged that they also deluged the letters page. Here’s the money quote from one of the letters to the editor (from Ronald Watts of Newcastle):
Australia’s crazy-high immigration numbers, the highest by far in the OECD, make adequate housing provision a physical impossibility. And it’s not racist to mention mass extinctions, water, congestion, and pollution as consequences of taking on more than we, or anyone else, can manage… A less extreme migrant intake, somewhere south of 100,000 per year, would allow infrastructure to catch up over 10-15 years while stabilising population… We are heading for a train wreck at the present rate of growth.
At the risk of belabouring the point, it wasn’t the socially conservative, insecurely employed, blue-collar readers of a Murdoch tabloid who turned on Wright. It was his own bobo tribe.
This leads me to wonder what happens to societies when even the elite-adjacent have lost faith in the elites.
You’ve never had it so good
Political commentators, especially those on the Left, are perplexed by the lack of gratitude being shown to Biden by American voters. In normal times, you’d expect a first-term president who had delivered full employment and respectable economic growth to romp home.
The standard explanation for the ‘vibecession’ (i.e. consumers feeling pessimistic about their circumstances and the broader economy, even though the available data suggests things are going swimmingly) is that while the headline figures look reassuring, American consumers aren’t benefitting much.
There’s undoubtedly something to this theory. But as the good times continue to roll, I find it ever more unpersuasive. Any American who wants one can now get a job, and those jobs typically pay more than they did when Biden took over. Granted, many Americans were traumatised by inflation early in Biden’s term, but that no longer seems to be a particularly salient issue.
This raises the question of what the salient issues are and why a seeming majority of American voters now believe Trump has the correct policies and Biden doesn’t.
Orthodox vs heterodox is the new Left-Right divide
Both parties of the centre-left and centre-right throughout the Anglosphere (and across much of the globe) have, more or less, devoutly maintained the neoliberal faith for four decades now.
After the shitshow of the latter half of the 1970s, neoliberals argued letting the free market rip, particularly by facilitating the free movement of labour, goods and capital between nations, would generate widespread peace and prosperity. To be fair, neoliberal policies have significantly increased the prosperity of the top quintile of income earners. Regrettably, results for the bottom four quintiles have been rather more mixed.
Mainstream ‘legacy’ political parties throughout the Anglosphere have continued to insist on pursuing neoliberal policies that a growing proportion of voters (Left, Right and Centre) don’t want. This has led many to argue the old Left-Right binary should be replaced with an Orthodox-Heterodox one.
Here's the neoliberal orthodoxy and some thoughts on how Biden and Trump position themselves in relation to it.
Immigration
Neoliberal orthodoxy: While nations outside the Anglosphere and Western Europe inexplicably fail to recognise it, the maximum possible immigration is an unalloyed good. Any concerns about the impacts of migration are irrational and solely a result of xenophobia.
Biden (2015): The wave [of migrants] still continues. It’s not going to stop. Nor should we want it to stop. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the things I think we can be most proud of.
Trump (2015): “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best... They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Social hyperliberalism
Neoliberal orthodoxy: As long as it doesn’t interfere with economic liberalism, social liberalism is fine. And if we’re going to enjoy economic hyperliberalism, we can’t very well argue against social hyperlibertarianism, can we?
Trump: It's amazing how strongly people feel about that. You see, I'm talking about cutting taxes, people go like that [muted-applause gesture]. I talk about transgender, everyone goes crazy. Who would have thought? Five years ago, you didn't know what the hell it was.
Biden: Transgender people are some of the bravest Americans I know, and our nation and the world are stronger, more vibrant, and more prosperous because of them. To transgender Americans of all ages, I want you to know that you are so brave. You belong. I have your back.
Free trade
Bill Clinton: Will [China] be the next great capitalist tiger, with the biggest market in the world, or the world's last great communist dragon and a threat to stability in Asia?... Economically, this agreement [letting China into the WTO] is the equivalent of a one-way street. It requires China to open its markets -– with a fifth of the world's population, potentially the biggest markets in the world – to both our products and services in unprecedented new ways. All we do is to agree to maintain the present access which China enjoys... For the first time, our companies will be able to sell and distribute products in China made by workers here in America without being forced to relocate manufacturing to China, sell through the Chinese government, or transfer valuable technology -- for the first time. We'll be able to export products without exporting jobs.
Trump: “China is raping this country.”
I’m being a little unfair to Biden with this last one. He’s maintained the Trump tariffs and implemented several other policies that would have Hayek spinning in his grave. Such as ramping up government spending in general, significantly boosting spending on infrastructure, championing a “modern industrial strategy”, attempting to patch up the US’s threadbare social safety net, and putting a heavy thumb on the scale for renewable energy.
But I suspect Biden runs into a vibecession-style issue again here. As president, Biden has made some bold departures from neoliberal orthodoxy, arguably far more daring than the ones Trump made during his term in office. But I suspect American voters continue to see Biden as a dyed-in-the-wool member of the Washington establishment. That being the case, they assume Biden shares the neoliberal enthusiasms of his recent Democrat and Republican predecessors.
What now?
To return to the question posed in the headline, I’m not quite sure what happens when a critical mass of citizens come to believe those in charge (a) aren’t as smart as they’ve long made out and (b) are presenting a version of reality that doesn’t have much overlap with on-the-ground realities experienced by non-elites.
For instance: China is our new source of cheap labour and consumers best friend. And just quietly, we really played those clueless Orientals with our ‘one-way street’ dealmaking brilliance! Nothing to see here regarding any jobs being lost or America’s manufacturing sector being relocated to China. Even better, China will magically transform into a ‘capitalist tiger’ rather than becoming a ‘communist dragon’ that threatens the stability of Asia.
Or perhaps: Why are you hand-wringing about hundreds of thousands/millions of new migrants showing up simply because Anglosphere governments have spent decades underinvesting in housing and infrastructure? What are ya? Some sort of Hansonite racist?
The brouhaha over Wright’s article will soon be forgotten. However, the yawning chasm between elites' and non-elites' perceptions of reality won’t soon disappear. I expect we’ll all be hearing a lot more about that disjuncture as November 5 draws closer.