Economy before Democracy

In the United States, economic concerns are likely to harm Biden … and to enhance Trump’s return to power in 2024.

If the economic concerns felt under Joe Biden continue to rage on, American voters may turn toward an alternative solution that poses risks of an entirely different scope: Donald Trump.

It has been clear for months now that the economy is the real priority for Americans. The problem of inflation, first rejected out of hand by the White House and the Federal Reserve and then being trivialized as “transitory,” simply cannot be denied.

The federal government’s most recent statistics on this point, published last week, show an increase in consumer prices that is unprecedented in nearly four decades.

Moreover, the data underestimate inflation in several respects compared to 40 years ago, in part because the American government has since modified its formula for calculating inflation. Real estate, for example, is no longer included in the index. The cost of housing in the United States has leaped some 20% in a year — nearly triple the level of global inflation, already historic, announced a few days ago.

And Biden takes the rap politically, especially with a central bank that is very limited in what it can do to subdue this inflation. The president’s approval level remains stuck below the 45% level — a zone of enormous danger for his party, if it were to stay at that level heading in to the November 2022 midterm elections. His approval level on the economy is dragging him down. It sits at less than 40%; on the specific question of inflation, it falls below 30%.

And this loss of ground is not happening in a vacuum; it seems to directly benefit Biden’s predecessor, Trump.

A New Battle

The day after the presentation of the most recent inflation statistics, Harvard University published the results of its most recent national poll. Over the course of the 2020 electoral year, Harvard conducted a dozen such surveys. All, without exception, showed Biden gaining; the last one, a week before the election, by eight percentage points (in the end, Biden carried the popular vote by four points).

Today, in December 2021, in a new hypothetical battle between Biden and Trump, the Harvard survey places the Republican ahead by three points. Against Vice President Kamala Harris, still hypothetically, Trump’s lead triples, exceeding nine points. In a context where, since the Trump campaign in 2016, the Electoral College naturally favors him, this sort of result would translate into a kind of electoral tidal wave for the former Republican president.

Paradoxically, new pieces of information, each more damning than the next, continue to come to light concerning Trump’s role at the time of the Capitol insurrection, the first anniversary of which is approaching. In recent days alone, text messages of the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., exhorting his father to direct his followers to leave the Capitol while the insurrection was unfolding, were made public. As is known, Trump senior never followed up on it.

What Trump is busily following up on at present is opposition to the few elected members of his party who dared to stand up to him during his failed coup attempt. At the beginning of the month, he gave his support to former Sen. David Perdue, who wants to unseat the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, who refused to intervene as Trump asked him in order to undo Biden’s narrow victory. This work of “purification,” which will continue throughout the midterm elections of 2022, aims at one thing: to create a Republican Party that will remain entirely united behind Trump in 2024 — whether he wins or refuses to concede that he has lost.

A Secondary Consideration

For an important segment of the American public, the democratic stakes, as noble as they may be, appear abstract and secondary in the face of the offer to restore a feeling of economic security — even if the latter comes from an authoritarian leader.

While being careful of simplistic comparisons, let us recall that fascism arose in large part in response to economic concerns. Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party came to power while fear of seeing the communists taking control of the Italian economy weighed heavily. In the same way, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party not only moved to the top of Germany by leveraging on popular discontent caused by the depression of the 1920s, but remained so in the years preceding World War II, thanks to a widely applauded economic rally.

Trump is neither Mussolini nor Hitler — and he is not yet the official candidate in the 2024 American presidential election, before which many things may yet change. The fact remains that a constant must be considered from now on: It is not only the fate of the Democratic Party that will be undermined by the current economic malaise if it is prolonged — it is also that of democracy.