Cleaning up Brad DeLong

Don's comment on my previous post quoting Brad DeLong was particularly interesting because it's more or less what Brad himself said before he somehow switched gears. Yes, Trump voters do generally believe a lot of crap that isn't true, but on the other hand there are legitimate reasons why many Americans are unhappy with the state of the nation. Obviously they've misplaced the blame and misdiagnosed the problem, but that doesn't mean Democratic politicians have nothing to answer for.

To summarize the history of the world, ever since the neolithic revolution the vast majority of Homo sapiens have lived on the edge of subsistence. The only way to escape that was to be a priest or a warlord and extract whatever surplus was available by force or fraud. So you have a small upper caste living large by oppressing everybody else. Of course they fought over the scraps and spent a lot of effort on making war and killing each other, which just made the masses all the more miserable.

Then things started to change, slowly at first but accelerating in the 19th Century. It became possible to gain affluence by invention and investment, not just force and fraud, and humanity escaped the Malthusian trap. There was still enormous inequality, but living standards for ordinary people in the United States and western Europe really did improve, quite notably by the early 20th Century. After World War II, inequality was also much reduced. Great fortunes had been destroyed, but rebuilding was more equitable. Labor unions were strong, and the productivity gains from technological innovation were shared more broadly than in the past. We had progressive taxation, and substantial investment in education and public amenities.

Sadly, plutocrats regained control over public discourse in the 1980s, creating what was called the neoliberal consensus. This was essentially a return to 19th Century laissez faire capitalism, and yes, the Democratic party bought into it -- with Bill Clinton hook, line and sinker. Living standards for people without advantages of inheritance or expensive education (and state universities were no longer cheap) stagnated and even fell. People don't compare their circumstances to their long dead ancestors. Telling them that they are in fact richer in many ways than Henry II isn't going to cut any ice.

What they see instead is the fabulous wealth of the very few, while they feel their own lives and the lives of their children are stuck in neutral. Sure, Republican policies are even worse for them but Republicans have messages they can understand. The "They" who are getting over on you aren't Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who are rich because they're smart and industrious; it's people who aren't like you and who are getting what they don't deserve but you do. Now, this is 100% bullshit but we have to ask why people are so eager to believe it. They want change and Kamala Harris was precisely not offering that. She ran a campaign based on Liz Cheney and protecting existing institutions. And I'll be the first to tell you that our existing institutions need to change. They definitely don't need to change into what the president-elect wants, but that's much too complicated of an argument for most people. So this is our dilemma.