Millions of Americans are experiencing real financial hardship because of Donald Trump‘s policies — and it’s getting worse. The country’s economy lost 92,000 jobs in February and the unemployment rate increased to 4.4%, according to numbers released on Friday morning. Only 13% of Americans feel financially secure. Later that afternoon, in a sure signal that investors were spooked by the job numbers and the war in Iran, the S&P 500 plummeted by two percent for the week, wiping out all the gains made in 2026.
Trump’s widening war of choice against Iran promises to make this even worse by disrupting the global economy and raising the price of oil, gas and other essential products. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman noted, the war’s cost looks much worse when measured in human terms: Replacing the three F-15E jets that were shot down over Kuwait will cost the equivalent of food for 125,000 Americans or health care for 100,000 children over the course of a year.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to brag about the economy, saying there is so much “winning” that people are begging him to stop and the affordability crisis is a “hoax” conjured by Democrats to undermine his MAGA Golden Age. Trump’s solipsistic alternate reality, though, does not change the facts. His approval ratings are at record lows, and a majority of Americans correctly blame him for the worsening economy.
But this is where the story gets more complicated, and much more dangerous. The conventional wisdom holds that presidents and the incumbent party will be punished at the polls because of the economy, particularly in midterm elections. On the surface, the GOP’s wave of losses in 2025’s off-year elections would seem to fit that pattern and logic. In reality, matters are much more complicated.
Voters don’t experience the economy in a vacuum. They compare their lives and experiences with their neighbors and peers, the larger community and their sense of the country as a whole. Moreover, the economy is an abstract concept for many Americans, often making their judgments about its overall health wrong, as humans are not purely rational in their political decision-making. A wide range of factors influence voting and other political behavior, such as partisanship, political knowledge, identity, concerns about cultural and social change, media consumption, signaling from elites and personal affinity for a given candidate.
The argument that voters punish politicians for a bad economy also leans heavily on two assumptions that no longer fully hold: that America’s democracy is relatively healthy, and that leaders feel accountable enough to the public to change course.
The argument that voters punish politicians for a bad economy also leans heavily on two assumptions that no longer fully hold: that America’s democracy is relatively healthy, and that leaders feel accountable enough to the public to change course — and will leave office when they are voted out. In the Age of Trump and amid rising authoritarianism, neither are guaranteed.
To the contrary, economic insecurity may actually make authoritarians like Trump more compelling to voters. This counterintuitive conclusion, based on new research from Northwestern University’s Center for Communication & Public Policy, has serious implications for how Democrats, the media and the mainstream political class think about elections, and politics more broadly.
The challenge, as explained to Northwestern Now by the center’s founder and professor Erik Nisbet, is that standard measures of democratic commitment are unreliable.
“Traditional surveys typically ask people whether they support democracy or value free expression,” he said. “Decades of research show that Americans overwhelmingly say ‘yes,’ but these self-reported attitudes often do not predict actual political behavior.”
Some of the study’s key findings, which were published in the journal Perspectives on Politics, are revealing — and timely. Commitments to liberal democratic norms are conditional, not fixed. When people feel financially secure, support for democratic principles increases. When they feel economically disadvantaged, voters are more open to authoritarianism and autocracy, with characteristics including a biased press, weakened checks on executive power and attacks on the rule of law. Perhaps most striking is that for both liberals and conservatives, political ideology mattered less than economic stress and hardship.
Trump and the Republicans may well be punished at the polls in the near term. That’s the good news. The bad news, which Nisbet’s research makes uncomfortably clear, is that a sustained economic downturn doesn’t weaken anti-democratic movements — it fuels them.
Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
America’s extreme — and steadily increasing — wealth and income gap has been politely described as a “K-shaped economy,” a sterile, technocratic term that obscures more than it reveals. What a K-shaped economy really means is an America where the rich and the plutocrats live in their own worlds, walled off, while everyone else is left to struggle. Moreover, in a K-shaped economy, the wealthy as a class have little if any sense of obligation to the common good. They instead use politics and the law to extract more wealth and resources from the American people while making themselves increasingly immune to democratic accountability.
In 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats made the democracy crisis and Trump’s authoritarian agenda the center of their campaign. That messaging did not move voters in sufficient numbers to elevate Harris to the presidency.
Nisbet was direct about what this means for Democrats. “The research suggests that messaging focused solely on abstract democratic ideals is unlikely to resonate with voters unless it is tied to their economic concerns,” he said. “Broader electorates require democracy narratives grounded in pocketbook realities.”
Looking to the midterms and beyond, the challenge for Democrats and the anti-Trump resistance is to connect economic pain to the threat authoritarianism poses to regular people’s wallets and day-to-day lives, something Harris and the party failed to do in 2024. The most effective argument is not an abstract one — it’s about corruption. Authoritarians and autocrats like Trump hate democracy because it places limits on their ability to rig the system for personal gain.
We need your help to stay independent
The president is a malign actor, a walking-talking moral hazard who is driven by gross self-interest and cares little, if at all, about the harm his actions cause. Like other autocrats and authoritarians, his political project is one of destruction rather than creation. If Trump becomes convinced that he’s politically doomed, he may choose to wreck the economy — and the country as a whole — so that his opponents inherit ruins.
He has consistently advanced policies that cause measurable harm to the country, and his personality and character show a fascination with destruction and violence. To further sabotage and destroy America’s economy would be Trump’s way of punishing a country and people he views as not deserving of his greatness.
From those ruins another authoritarian may emerge, one far more dangerous than Trump, with tens of millions of desperate Americans primed and ready to embrace anyone who promises them jobs, healthcare and a better way forward. Desperate people make poor choices.
Read more
about authoritarianism
The post Why many Americans would trade democracy for more money appeared first on Salon.com.
from Salon.com https://ift.tt/OjlkaJK
Hello, my name is Asma E Nur. I am a tech blogger.
No comments:
Post a Comment