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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?
I think it’s interesting that your bias is to worry about long run disaster but assume the short run will more or less stay the same. But you can’t have a disaster in the long run without it eventually arriving in the short.
I think you might be roughly right about a Biden win but I suspect a Trump win would call into question the entire point of elections, esp. a Trump win where his popular vote loss increases and we have selective nonsense like some Repubiclian states trying to declare no counting can continue past election day, say to favor Republican voters who voted at polls while leaving Democratic ones who mailed their ballots in uncounted. So in a sense a boring Biden Presidency would be a bit like a boring ride on the Titanic where the captain was more careful about ice bergs and nothing of interest happened except people eating pretentious food.
Long story short, I think the potential for damage to the US here is catastrophic, although things might play out that we’re never going to be able to prove that.
Debt – I think the critical concept that you must get here is that there is an absolute difference between different types of spending. Spending probably should only be used to describe the physical purchase of goods and services. Everything else is finance. You do know this on a personal level. If you refinance your mortgage this year, you don’t think of it as spending a few hundred thousand to pay off your old mortgage while refinancing to pull some money out and redo your deck is clearly spending, but only on the deck.
In thinking about the deficit, you have to back out the finance part of it. If the gov’t puts a $1T check into your 401K and your 401K buys a 0% $1T 30 yr bond, has anything happened?
This is an excellent point, and I probably didn’t explain it well enough. Let me try and address it:
1- Spontaneous catastrophe’s are possible. Spontaneous salvation is a lot more difficult. Biden is not going to save us.
2- Even if we’re looking at the possibility of spontaneous catastrophe’s I don’t think the election is going to provide one of those mostly because I think Biden is going to win by a comfortable enough margin.
3- Also catastrophe’s are never quite as final or absolute as people think. This kind of goes back to my post “The Apocalypse will not be as cool or as deadly as you think”. In other words, rather than pushing for massive catastrophe’s my position is more subtle. The normalcy we’ve experienced over the last few decades is an outlier. Chaos is far more common than we think, but also people and institutions are more resilient than you think, so it will neither be as good or as bad as you think.
I agree that if Trump was as clever as his supporters think, and if the shenaigans were as deep and as broad as people think it could really ignite a firestorm, but I think the stories of Republicans doing this or that are overblown, isolated, and not nearly enough to tip things. So yes, the potential damage a machiavellian president could do is “catastrophic” but Trump is not that guy. Also I think he would need a lot more support at the Supreme Court and Senate level to pull it off, and his support in both places was never as strong as people feared, and it’s eroding all the time.
Fair points. In terms of #1 wouldn’t not hitting the iceberg be a type of ‘spontaneous salvation’? Although none the passengers may even notice?
“2- Even if we’re looking at the possibility of spontaneous catastrophe’s I don’t think the election is going to provide one of those mostly because I think Biden is going to win by a comfortable enough margin.”
It’s easy to miss an iceberg by a wide margin. Hitting the iceberg remains a catastrophe. It is kind of interesting to imagine if the Titanic never sank, would we have gone on for decades without enough lifeboats and taking icebergs seriously? Maybe or maybe another sinking would have snapped us awake.
Sadly with Covid I see the alternative possibility, nothing snaps anyone awake…
– Well 99% of people who travel by boat don’t die by iceberg.
– It’s psychologically stressful to not get on a boat when you need to get somewhere. How much damage does that cause?
– Close down cruise ships for a few weeks, then when everyone forgets open them back up again.
The Titanic played out with a different dynamic possibly because the loss of the upper crust made it clear none of the games would have worked. (“Well Mr. Rockerfeller, I know your son died but let’s remember the 99% of other sons who didn’t die and since he couldn’t swim he kind of had a pre-existing condition” errrr no). I suspect a Trump win would be catastrophic not so much because the present shenaigans are so evil. It would be catastrophic because it would indicate there is no check at all on anything. I suspect that locks in both conflict and failure. Granted it doesn’t mean we’ll be eating out of cans in 4 years, but the potential for failure
” (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%. ”
Except China did seem to stop it. And yes I know people jump up with “and do you trust numbers from China!” and I’ll say I don’t trust official numbers from China but I do trust that numbers exist and math is still math, even in China. If you want to say China had twice as many deaths go for it. Yet China shutdown and stopped the virus to the point outbreaks that happened after were quickly contained and were entirely imported as far as anyone could tell.
I think what Covid has done has been to expose most gov’ts. Back in the 90’s, there was this idea of the gov’t as powerful and nefarious. The X-files probably indicated this angst pretty well. Stumble into the wrong place, and vans quickly show up with men in black suits and sunglasses.
The reality is gov’t is run by people who don’t know what they are doing and are counting on the sun coming up tomorrow just like it did today so they can take credit for it. When actual shit hits the fan, they are more likely to spin and deflect. The degree this strategy is successful, is the degree the nation is failing. To the degree it is not successful, and success depends on changing tactics quickly to adjust to a new reality, the country will be increasing and thriving.
Perhaps you should test countries by comparing nations whose chief of state got the virus compared to those that didn’t. Note that exercise would put the US, UK and Brazil into the same bucket. If you calculate what the ‘average nation’ should do leaving out those countries, I think you’re going to see “everything would have been the same except maybe 10% better” isn’t going to cut it.
China did seem to stop it, and while I think their numbers are cooked I do think they did better than any Western Democracy, but that’s the key point. It’d be one thing if France was kicking our but, or worse if Mexico was doing better, but comparing a country with as much top down control as China with the US is really an apples and oranges thing.
Also you’re sort of making the same point I’m making, much of what happened in America is due to the government separate from Trump. The CDC screwed up fairly significantly before it was even on Trump’s radar. It’s also clear that the level of mask opposition in the US is a degree beyond what it is anywhere in Europe. And yes some of that is Trump, but I think that would exist regardless of who the president was. If anything I think it might have been worse if Obama was president. Which is not an indictment of Obama, more of an indictment of the idiocy of the people, but you can’t compare Trump to Xi JinPing, you have to compare him to some other potential president.
“but comparing a country with as much top down control as China with the US is really an apples and oranges thing.”
Well yes, but maybe it’s more like comparing apple based diet with fast food based diet and declaring such a thing isn’t really fair since they are so different. That may be but one country will be fit and trim and the other fat and diabetic. If your focus is on long term survival and risk reduction, one path seems to have a future and the other doesn’t. We get the economy shut down for an extended period and the deaths while they get less of both. That’s not to say their system is the answer or the only answer but perhaps the proper frame here is sputnik. When the USSR launched sputnik, the proof that they had advanced a step beyond us could not be denied. Doesn’t mean we embraced Soviet communism but we also didn’t shrug and say well we’re busy cultivating cartoons and cotton candy and how useful is it to really hear a beep over the radio from space?
I agree with you on the masks but just imagine a Trump who embraced the leadership opportunity and didn’t undercut mask wearing and lockdown. Yes some militia types might have awkwardly balked but the degree of lockstepism among Trump supporters is pretty strong and the Russian bot brigades are well aligned too (they could turn obviously but not on a dime least they lose their credibility on social media). Perhaps Republicans would double down on fighting fighting Covid under Biden. That’s essentially what they did under Obama when they fought to slow down the economy least a Democrate get credit. Long run I don’t see many options beyond the eventual shutdown of the GOP as a viable political party.