Both main candidates were unelectable but one was more in tune with the nation than the other

So from January 20, 2025, Donald Trump will inherit the on-going genocide that the US government has been party to in the Middle East. He will then have no cover and will be judged accordingly. What follows are a few thoughts that I had when I watched the unfolding disaster for the Democrats and the amazing victory that Trump has recorded. It was obviously a Hobson’s Choice facing the US voters (from an outside perspective), which also tells us something about the way the US society has evolved. Both candidates were in my view unelectable. But the voters didn’t agree with me. And, one candidate was much smarter that the other and better understood the plight the American voters are in after several decades of neoliberalism. Spare the thought.

I am on the public record as saying that if I was an American voter I would have voted for Jill Stein because, despite some misgivings I have about her narratives (particularly about macroeconomics), she has been consistently green and consistently against the way the Israelis have treated the Palestinians.

Those two issues are of utmost importance in my World View.

I noted that many claimed a vote for her would effectively be a vote for Trump.

Which implies that some people should not have agency to express their voting preference, which I would find offensive if I was an American.

The Democrats who tried to vilify Jill Stein on that basis were really saying that voters should not have a choice and should just vote for Harris no matter what they thought.

That was the line that Bernie Sanders took telling people in his last Op Ed that Kamala might be bad on Gaza but Trump would be worse.

Well, Trump hasn’t been president or vice-president while the US government has been sending massive quantities of lethal weapons and support to Israel, which has enabled the genocide to proceed.

Only one Party has done that so far in this current period.

So no matter what Sanders said, he couldn’t justify what his own party and the candidate he wanted people to vote for, had been up to.

Which has been a disgusting and disgraceful abuse of human rights in the most extreme form.

The US government could have brought Israel to heal if it had withdrawn all financial and political support for the Israeli government.

A US boycott of Israel would have forced the Israeli’s to negotiate a security solution rather than the path they have taken to obliterate a whole population of people they don’t want to exist.

The latter course of action was exactly the path the Nazis took in the 1940s in Europe.

History is repeating itself in that respect.

I don’t think the Gaza issue was all that important in the overall voting in the Presidential election but it seems that in some electoral districts it was instrumental in Trump’s victory.

I read that in the “two cities, which have the highest percentage of Arab Americans among all cities in the United States”, Trump either won or made huge gains relative to Harris (Source).

The article reported that:

In Dearborn, where 55% of the residents are of Middle Eastern descent, Trump won with 42.48% of the vote over Vice President Kamala Harris, who received 36.26%, according to results, with 100% of precincts counted, provided to the Free Press from City Clerk George Darany. Jill Stein received 18.37% of the vote …

Trump also won in Dearborn Heights, where 39% of the residents are of Middle Eastern descent, defeating Harris 44% to 38.3%, with Stein at 15.1%.

So not only did Jill Stein poll unusually high – which I estimate was due to Democrats rejecting the Harris position on Gaza but not wanting to vote for Trump, but Trump himself energised the voters.

In the 2020 election, Trump had only gained 29.9 per cent of the vote.

So a massive gain for him as well as the Stein vote.

It was obvious – why would these people vote for Harris when her government was supporting and facilitating the slaughter of some of their family members or friends in Gaza or Lebanon?

The border issue was obviously important.

In their report (July 22, 2024) – What we know about unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. – Pew Research estimated that:

The unauthorized immigrant population in the United States grew to 11.0 million in 2022 … The increase from 10.5 million in 2021 reversed a long-term downward trend from 2007 to 2019. This is the first sustained increase in the unauthorized immigrant population since the period from 2005 to 2007.

They also noted that since that data was published “The U.S. unauthorized immigrant population has likely grown over the past two years”.

They noted that other sources revealed that there were record border “encounters … throughout 2022-23” and “the number of applicants waiting for decisions on asylum claims increased by about 1 million by the end of 2023”.

In 2022, this cohort “represented 3.3% of the total U.S. population and 23% of the foreign-born population”.

The Democrats could not escape responsibility for the increases in the last few years.

Trump obviously knew that it was a political issue and played it for all it was worth.

Of course I disagree with the way he constructs the problem – all the talk of criminals and people eating dogs etc – was deeply offensive and disgraceful.

But it was an issue and it is clear that nations have to have population policies in place that allow them to manage the growth of that population.

Demographers developed the – Push and pull factors in migration – framework in order to understand migration flows between nations.

The push factors promote incentives for people to leave their current place and seek residence elsewhere, while pull factors are the attractors that make one country more favourable for migration than another.

Examples are:

Push: not enough job opportunities, natural disasters, authoritarian regimes, poor housing, war, etc

Pull: job opportunities, better welfare security, kinder political regime, better housing and health care, etc

Rich nations, especially those with porous borders will always provide ‘pull’ incentives to citizens in poorer nations where the ‘push’ factors are strong.

There are two options then.

First, recognise the strength of the ‘pull’ factors and encourage migration with orderly administrative processes in place.

The fact that Biden Administration appeared to ‘lose’ control of the border in the last few years does not suggest those administrative processes were working effectively.

Second, recognise the strength of the ‘push’ factors in countries where people are likely to be migrating from and use foreign aid outlays to help reduce them.

For example, help poorer nations improve education and health care systems.

Help create good quality employment and improve wages growth.

Help the nation build adequate housing and public infrastructure.

What has the US been doing in terms of foreign aid?

In 1970, all the advanced nations signed up to the UN commitment to spend at least 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid – see this – The 0.7% ODA/GNI target – a history – for more details.

A Brookings Institute study (September 12, 2024) – What is US foreign assistance?reveals that:

The average for all wealthy nations is around 0.3%, with the U.S. ranking at the bottom.

The US spends around 0.3 per cent of GDP on foreign aid and that proportion or less has been stable since the mid-1980s.

Here is a graph from the Congressional Research Service (via Brookings) which tells that story.

Rather than waste resources building a – Trump wall – along the Southern border of the USA, it would have been much more humane and probably much more effective to invest heavily in the nations that are pushing their citizens to leave.

But that would require the US authorities to understand the capacity of their currency and to spend that currency on useful things rather than financing the destructive IDF assault on Palestinian humanity.

Further, the US dominates the IMF and the World Bank and both institutions have screwed the poorer nations with their pernicious structural adjustment packages over the last several decades.

The damage that these multilateral institutions have caused in the poorer nations, driven by the US oversight, have amplified the ‘push’ factors.

And might I add the ‘push’ factors must be pretty bad for anyone to want to go to the US anyway (laugh).

Then we come to the ‘cost-of-living’ issues, which appear to have played quite a part in the Democratic defeat.

I find this aspect really amusing as it represents how to be too smart for your own good.

At the beginning of each of his campaign speeches Donald Trump asked the audience (both in person and via the electronic media) whether they were better off now relative to what the state they were in 4 years ago.

It was a loaded question of course, given the mismatch between presidential terms and shifting economic outcomes and the special events that may arise within a term of office (like a GFC, or pandemic).

The Democrats wanted to claim that the economy is strong and people have never been better off and that the Biden Administration, and by implication, Kamala Harris, had brought the cost-of-living spike down fairly quickly.

The problem with their rhetoric on the inflation episode was that it was contradictory and inherently self-defeating.

For years they have been telling the public that the Federal Reserve Bank is independent of the Government and that its primary remit is to maintain price stability.

They told the people – aided and abetted by mainstream New Keynesian economists – that monetary policy should prioritise keeping inflation under check and fiscal policy should not undermine that quest by working against the direction of the central bank’s policy stance.

They also kept telling the public that this was the most responsible and effective way to deal with inflation and maintain prosperity.

So when the inflationary spike hit in the wash up to the first bad years of the pandemic and the Federal Reserve Bank started hiking interest rates, people (voters) had been conditioned (brain washed) to believe that the higher interest rates would bring down inflation.

Just as they had been told over and over again by the neocons in the Democratic Party.

And sure enough the inflationary spike has effectively dissipated (and the central bank is cutting rates) which led people to believe that it was the central bank that had reduced their cost-of-living nightmare rather than anything Biden or Harris had done via the Treasury.

After all – they had been conditioned to believe that the central bank was independent.

It didn’t matter that the reality of the situation is that the Federal Reserve Bank’s action had little to do with the fall in the inflation rate.

The inflation rate rose and fell again because supply constraints were created by the response to the pandemic and then Russia invaded the Ukraine.

But the public has been so conditioned by economists and the politicians that hide behind the economists that it was the central bank’s doing that they couldn’t disentangle cause and effect in this situation.

Which then meant, ironically, that Biden or then Harris could not take credit for the declining inflation rate.

Mission accomplished – lie and deceive and then pay the price.

Finally, and I will have more to say about this data in due course, the Democrats have forgotten who votes governments and Presidents in.

By wheeling out the celebrities, who probably arrived to the rallies in chauffeur-driven cars, etc after going to the hairdresser and outfitter for a coiffure and some fashion styling, the Democrats revealed how out of touch they are with the voters that delivered Trump his victory.

Sure enough the characters that adorned Trump’s stages were pretty boorish and awful – to wit, the Hulk guy who is ageing and struggled to complete his signature rip the tee-shirt open.

But they resonate with the mainstream voters it seems, which tells one something useful about the state of sophistication of American society.

The Democrats (remember Clinton) consider them deplorable, but guess what, they vote and this time they voted in large numbers with one aim in mind to eliminate what they see as woke.

The Democrat campaign was seemingly oblivious to all that.

Moreover, the data trends are not attractive for the Democrats.

Here is a graph I compiled from the large US census databases, which shows mean real income in 2023 dollars (indexed to 100 at 1967) for the quintiles plus the top 5 per cent from 1967 to 2023.

The shaded areas are those that coincide with a Democratic President (LBJ, Carter, Clinton, Obama, Biden).

What do you see?

It appears that the relativities were stable but started to diverge in the mid-1980s as neoliberalism emerged.

But the real divergence – when the top quintile and especially the top 5 per cent part of that quintile left the pack – occurred under the Clinton Presidency.

The next major acceleration in the divergence came under the Obama Presidency.

It is clear that these trends are part of the hollowing out of the middle class that has occurred in the US and the Democrats have overseen much of the process.

That means that the Democrat candidate demonstrated an error of judgement when she said she would not have done anything different.

It was hubris because down in the streets, the citizens who make up the vast majority of voters have felt the pain of trends in income distribution, where the top-end-of-town has captured a disproportionate amount of the GDP ‘income growth’.

In terms of shares of total income, the lowest quintile households accounted for 4 per cent of total income received in 1967 and ratio was relatively stable up until the early 1990s.

It has been steadily declining since and now stands are 3.1 (2023).

The top quintile went from to 43.6 per cent (1967) to 51.9 per cent (2023).

The top 5 per cent went from to 17.2 per cent (1967) to 23 per cent (2023).

There was also a hollowing out of the middle quintile – the ‘middle class’.

Conclusion

There is a lot more to it than what I have written about today.

But those are just a few thoughts that I had when I watched the unfolding disaster for the Democrats and the amazing victory that Trump has recorded.

I know it was a Hobson’s Choice, which also tells us something about the way the US society has evolved.

Both candidates were in my view unelectable.

But one was much smarter that the other and better understood the plight the American voters are in after several decades of neoliberalism.

That is enough for today!

(c) Copyright 2024 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.