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At the moment it’s difficult to think of anything but the election, so while I considered trying to write about something else, I think it would be difficult to find the required focus. (Though for those of you who follow me on Twitter, I am planning a post on the website wtfhappenedin1971.com.) Of course as bad as it is right now, I imagine that a few days after this goes out, i.e. after the election already happened, focusing on anything else is going to be impossible.

People are obviously putting a lot of weight on the outcome of this election, which I think has been the case for a while when it comes to presidential elections, certainly 2000, 2004 and 2008 felt that way. There was perhaps a little bit of a break in 2012. The shine was off of Obama, and whatever Romney’s faults, no one thought he was an existential threat or a potential messiah in the manner of Bush, Gore, Obama, Clinton or Trump in other elections. (I’ll let you decide who thought which of those things about whom.) Despite the seemingly low stakes of 2012 I remember thinking it was a big deal. In particular I was worried about the rising federal debt level, which is laughable looking back, not because the debt has ceased to worry me but because these days I would love to get back to just worrying about spending, but also, however big I was worried the debt would get, COVID has taken my most pessimistic projection and smashed it on the concrete, repeatedly, and then jumped up and down on what was left.

Another issue with worrying about the debt these days is that there’s really no longer any expectation that either party will do anything about it. If you’re worried about too much immigration then you can hold out some hope that if Trump wins reelection it will be reduced. Or if you’re worried about the opposite problem of too little immigration and mistreatment of those who do immigrate, then you have good reason to predict that this might change under Biden, but if you’re worried about the deficit neither of the two major candidates even pretends that they’ll do anything about it. Thus it’s best to adopt a fairly insouciant attitude, and pray that the modern monetary theorists are correct, despite all of your intuitions telling you that they’re not.

This, then, is the point of this post, to take some small stab at identifying what will change, and what won’t after the election. And right off the bat my suspicion/prediction is that less will change than most people imagine. Which is why I started with a discussion of the deficit/debt. Not only is this not going to change, but I think everyone has pretty much acknowledged this fact. However I would also submit that people are suffering from the opposite problem, where they haven’t accepted that the deficit is just one of the many things that aren’t going to change, where they still hold out false hope that when Biden is elected we’ll finally get Scandinavian style socialism or that Trump will actually build a wall. Which takes us to our first scenario, the one where you would expect the least amount of change, Trump getting reelected. We’ll use that as a warm up for eventually discussing how even if lots of things get changed by the election not as much as you might expect will change on the ground.

If Trump is reelected, defying pollsters and predictions once again, then it’s hard to imagine that the Republicans won’t also maintain control of the Senate, though regardless of what happens in those two contests I am confident in predicting that they won’t retake the house. Given that nothing was changed at the macro level by the election, you would expect that very little would change on the ground as well. And this holds true even for the things hoped for by Trump’s supporters. 

As I already said I don’t think Trump will finally build the wall in his second term. In fact, I predict that if Trump is given a second term that he won’t accomplish much of anything. (Certainly he won’t bring a Satanic ring of pedophiles to justice.) But, in saying this I don’t mean to place very much of the projected blame for this on Trump. He’s got numerous things working against him. First, there is a lot of truth to the people who claim that he’s been relentlessly attacked by the mainstream media, academia, and the permanent bureaucracy since he took office. Second, as I mentioned when I reviewed The Decadent Society, there’s a lot of sclerosis in Washington right now (and for the foreseeable future). Consequently it’s just harder in general to get anything done at all regardless of your position and backing. Finally there are the Democrats who won’t give him an inch on anything (and to be fair that’s basically how the Republican’s treated Obama). 

Speaking of decadence and Obama, even without the relentless criticism by the mainstream press, I don’t recall him doing much in his second term either. They had to pull out all the stops to get Obamacare over the finish line early in his first term, and that was basically the extent of the significant legislation he enacted. In a similar fashion the Republicans managed to pass their tax cuts and since doing that there really hasn’t been anything else that was worthy of note. All of this is to say that four more years of Trump will be very similar to the last couple of years. Lots of sturm and drang, but without any real substance. (I am excluding emergency relief packages since they’re reactive legislation that would basically happen regardless of who controls the government.)

Now you might object that at the level of the Supreme Court things have changed enormously, and that Trump deserves the credit. I’ll get to that, but it’s something which has already changed, not something which will change based on the outcome of things on November 3rd. Though it does provide one more reason for people on the left to hope that Trump doesn’t win. Breyer is 82, and yes RBG made it all the way to 87, but after what happened during Trump’s first term I don’t think anyone’s plans should hinge on Breyer remaining healthy for the entire time.

The next possibility we should consider is a Biden victory, but the Republicans somehow manage to hold on to the Senate by the skin of their teeth. Once again, I think less changes than most people think. Certainly, Biden reverses all of Trump’s executive orders, DACA gets reinstated, transgender people may once again serve in the military, etc. And given how powerful the executive order has become he might be able to pull off other things as well. Though I suspect that the 6-3 Supreme Court will temper those powers at least a little bit. So yes there will be some changes, certainly around the edges, but from a legislative perspective I wouldn’t expect much. Certainly there’s the possibility that if Biden proposes something relatively moderate that he might be able to peel off enough Republicans to get it across the finish line, but something moderate enough to get past a Republican Senate also has to be moderate enough to not change things very much. 

Presumably most people would be unsurprised by the idea that not much will change if the Republicans maintain control of the Senate (regardless of how things turn out with Trump). But I imagine that the same could not be said of people’s expectations if the Democrats end up controlling both the presidency and congress. And once again, I would submit that they’re going to be disappointed. I do think that beltway politics will calm down, particularly the permanent bureaucracy. They’ll be in the news less, we’ll go back to a time where there are fewer so-called crises, fewer instances where department heads are called to testify before congress. Of course just because the government calms down does not mean that our problems are solved. I actually think the bureaucracy could use some shaking up, and it’s unfortunate that Trump didn’t do more than that.

It’s obvious why things don’t change if you have “those obstructionist Republicans!” in control of the Senate, it’s less obvious why things don’t change if you have control of both houses of congress and the presidency. A big part of the issue is the sclerosis I mentioned above, an issue which Ross Douthat points out in his book The Decadent Society. And at this point it would be useful to turn to that book for it’s description of the passage of Obamacare, the last major Democratic policy victory:

The Obamacare case study is useful here, not least because it’s a rare example where a meaningful reform, as opposed to just a deficit funded tax cut [see Trump’s one legislative accomplishment] or a spending boost, did ultimately pass—unlike Clinton’s health care fiasco, or Bush’s doomed Social Security reform effort, or the Trump administration’s Obamacare repeal-and-replace effort, or every attempted immigration reform deal…

We should pause here to note the list of all the attempts to change things that failed, and this is before our current hyperpartisanship, and largely with more favorable numbers and support. Of course even with these advantages Obamacare did suffer a huge amount of resistance, though less of it came from Republicans than people remember:

The real reason that Obamacare opposition became so fierce, and the debate so toxic, was that the health care system [is]… a huge sprawl of client populations and powerful interest groups, all of which have a strong financial stake in the existing system, and all of which have spent decades building up the lobbying shops and inner-ring knowledge required to either frustrate or redirect reform.

Of course this doesn’t apply to just the healthcare system, but most areas of government. Including the one that’s getting the most attention right now: the police. I would assume that the police and their unions are equally powerful if not more so, particularly at a local level, though it was not always this way with either the police or with healthcare.

This thicket of clients and stakeholders and interest groups barely existed when Franklin Roosevelt was clearing the ground for the New Deal; it grew far more sparsely when Lyndon Johnson established Medicare and Medicaid. But those president’s achievements fertilized and thickened it, leaving future reformers little choice but to do what Obama ultimately did and rely on inefficient and overly complicated workarounds, disguised or delayed tax increases, and of course, some simple lies…

I’m being hard on Obama, so it’s important to stress that this is what success looks like.

This is the depressing morale of the whole sad story. Obamacare is as good as it gets in terms of making big changes in government. As Douthat says, this is what success looks like. Is there anyone who thinks that Biden is going to be more successful than Obama? That big changes which couldn’t be implemented then, with all the initial goodwill and legislative strength, are going to be implementable now? This is why I don’t think much is going to change. Because of how difficult change of any kind already was, and nothing has gotten easier since Obamacare, rather everything has gotten more difficult.

Fair enough, you may be saying, we won’t get any legislative breakthroughs just because we elect Biden, but I’d be happy if we just had a saner COVID response, or if we got some substantial action on BLM and the protests. But once again, I think people are going to be disappointed. If it’s not clear already it’s important to separate out what things the president (and the Senate) are directly responsible for, and therefore might change if they change, and what sort of things would happen and are happening regardless of who’s in power. I think this separation has become more difficult since Trump was elected because he draws so much attention that it starts to seem like everything is connected with him (And indeed in some respects this is his great talent.) But because of this you forget that, speaking of COVID, other developed countries are not doing that much better than the US. Belgium and Spain are ahead of us in deaths per 100k, we’re essentially tied with the UK, and we’re only about 10% ahead of Italy. Which is to say, while it’s always possible that a different president could have saved thousands of lives, no president could have stopped it entirely or even decreased things by more than about 10-20%. 

None of this is to say that things aren’t changing, they are and rapidly, which brings me to the other thing I think people are hoping will improve under Biden, the protests and the associated demands of the BLM movement. Part of this hope has to stem from the nearly ubiquitous narrative that Trump is a racially divisive figure, which is of course true, but also exaggerated, particularly when it comes to blaming him for what’s happening now. As an example of what I mean by that let’s take the recent shooting in Philadelphia, now imagine that it happened in exactly the fashion it did, the same in every particular, only instead of taking place at the end of October it took place at the end of November with Biden confirmed as the winner of the election. Do you think the protests and the reaction would have been any different? More generally do you think that protests are going to go away if Biden is elected president? That either police shootings will stop happening or that people will stop caring about them just because someone else is the president?

You may counter with the argument that November is too soon. That Biden won’t have the chance to implement any policies which will address the concerns of the protestors. But what policies do you imagine he might implement? Certainly the fact that he’s an old white guy with a history of being reasonably tough on crime is going to make it hard for him to calm the nation by the sheer force of his influence and charisma. Nor is the problem particularly amenable to high level solutions. This is a local problem, which let it be remembered, is most apparent in cities which are already controlled by Democrats. Now of course I would love to be wrong about this. I’d love it if Biden came in and single-handedly healed the nation’s racial divisions, if he succeeded where every other president since at least the mid 60s has failed, but I think we can agree that this probably won’t happen.

Lest you think I am being too flippant there is of course a whole discussion to be had about where BLM goes from here, and how the election affects that trajectory, and there certainly is an argument to be made that the reelection of Trump would result in the biggest protests of all, and that this would certainly represent something that changed after the election, but it’s not a change Trump can be held responsible for, but rather something of a heckler’s veto. In essence what I’m saying is that even if you think that Trump winning the election would increase the protests you can’t use that to extrapolate the other way and assume that if Trump makes protests worse that Biden has to make the protests better. At best, he might make them different.

This assertion gets to my central point. Biden is not going to make everything better, there is no return to normal, some dramatic change from the chaos of the Trump years to the mundanity of the Biden presidency. No vast legislative package that will swoop in to save the day. COVID will still be a problem, people will still be mad at the police (and conversely the police will still feel unfairly attacked), China will still be out there doing whatever it is China does, and people will gradually realize that, other than appointing three Supreme Court Justices, Trump had far less of an impact than people think, and that his disappearance (or at least his removal from office, I don’t think he’ll be disappearing anytime soon) is not going to magically heal everything that’s wrong with the country. That in essence he has been unfairly blamed for too much of what’s wrong. 

Some of you may be protesting at this point that by artificially limiting my discussion to things that might change to the narrow category of things that might change based on the election results that I am overlooking a huge source of recent change, Amy Coney Barrett’s elevation to the Supreme Court. And indeed that is a big change and it deserves to be discussed, but even here I think conservative hopes and liberal fears are both equally overblown. I predict that Obamacare will not be judicially gutted or overturned. That Roe v. Wade will persist, though I could certainly imagine that they might give greater deference to state level restrictions and that states might use these to make abortions very difficult to obtain. That the election will not be decided, in Trump’s favor, by the Supreme Court. And that in general the court will be surprisingly deferential to precedent, and particularly to legislative decisions. So if the Democrats do end up in control of the House and Senate they will have the perfect platform from which to create the world they say they want, and I predict that the Supreme Court is very unlikely to completely disregard any decisions they reach legislatively.

In conclusion, as long as we’re on the subject of predictions. I’d like to go ahead and make a few more. Though as a reminder my predictions generally concern black swans (or to be technical grey swans). Either those people fear, but don’t need to worry about (see the predictions I just made about the court) or those which might or might not happen, but the probability is large enough that you should probably worry. Which is what I’ll do now.

I don’t think Biden will die in office, but I do think that he will exhibit increasing mental degradation in speech and behavior. Discussion of the 25th Amendment will begin shortly after he takes office, initially by pundits and people in need of content but increasingly by Republicans and even members of his own party. Depending on how well liked Harris is, it just might happen.

Democrats won’t immediately pack the courts, but they’ll have their finger on the trigger just waiting for an excuse to pull it. This will be one of the reasons why the Supreme Court won’t be as radical as people fear (or hope). If Roberts isn’t able to keep things together and something dramatic does happen, then they’ll try it, and they might very well succeed, if so it will be incredibly destabilizing over the long run.

Calls for various social justice measures will dramatically increase. Biden, Pelosi and whoever ends up with McConnell’s job will have a difficult time placating or even controlling far left elements of their party (another reason why legislative victories will be difficult). While a Trump victory might result in very intense focused protests, a Biden victory will result in broad, long lasting agitation on many separate fronts.

In essence, a Biden presidency will not be notably less chaotic than Trump’s presidency was.

I’m interested in your predictions. Where do you think I’m wrong? What do you think is going to happen with the Supreme Court? Do you think I’m ever going to stop asking for donations?