It's the inflation, stupid w/ James Meadway
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Hello and welcome to Politics Theory Other. My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is The Economist and host of the brilliant Macrodose podcast, James Meadway.

In today's episode we talked about the economics of Donald Trump's election victory and why James lays much of the blame for Kamala Harris's defeat at the door of mainstream economics and the failure to adopt more unconventional responses to inflation. We also talked about why Donald Trump did so well amongst young white men and about what role the Democrats' enabling of the Gaza genocide had in the election results.

Plenty of explanations have been offered for why Kamala Harris lost the election. And in surprisingly decisive terms, with Donald Trump not only sweeping the swing states, but also possibly the popular vote. If so, he'd be the first Republican to do so since George W. Bush in 2004. And the Democrats' defeat may well have had many causes, but it does seem likely that the most significant factor was inflation.

and how ordinary Americans were actually experiencing what was being lauded as a very successful economic rebound. Indeed, in October, The Economist was describing the US economy as the envy of the world. And we'd seen all this rather patronizing talk about the vibe session and that there was this supposedly strange divergence between the headline economic indicators and how people reported how they actually felt about their economic situation.

Do you see inflation as the most important factor in Trump's victory? And why do you think the economic data so poorly captured how ordinary people were experiencing life under the Biden administration, especially after the lapse of the welfare state expansions during the pandemic?

Well, yes, I do. Look, if you're looking at a vote for the Republicans, I mean, it's slightly complicated by the fact that to a large extent, what's happened is that people did not vote for the Democrats, like the Democrats' total vote has sort of fallen across the board. But if you look at the swing on the people actually voted towards the Republicans, it is across whichever demographic you choose to split it, whether it's men or

women, or whether it's by age, or whether it's by income group, or whether it's by where you work, or where you live in the country is absolutely universal. And if it's absolutely universal, you see something like this happening. It's not as you've seen some, at least one British commentator, you know, wringing their hands and saying, Oh, God, it was just a wave. It's like a force of nature. There's nothing you can really do about this. It's not a failure of strategy. No, no, there's an actual cause for this.

And there's one thing that unites everyone, which is it is the economy, stupid. And it is the fact that everything is really expensive and is still really expensive. And frankly, out of everybody you could blame for this, my own personal list, but I think it's the right one, starts with the economists and starts with that mainstream of liberal economic opinion, which during the last sort of four years or so, facing this surge in prices driven in the first instance

as a result of the war in Ukraine and then the aftershocks of COVID. These are supply side problems. These are problems of stuff is harder to get and then there's profiteering on top, but stuff is kind of harder to get. And the response to this from the mainstream economics was to say, to do the most useless thing possible, by the way, which is to say, ah, in order to combat prices,

going up, we need to find one thing and make its price go up, which is interest rates, the price of borrowing money. We make that go up. We'll make at least one thing much more expensive, and this will get rid of inflation. It doesn't at all. And it's useless for most people. And you have this fall in living standards across the population in the US, in America, in Britain, across Europe,

That experience is the common factor that ties all of this together. So that when Donald Trump says, and he did say, he said this repeatedly, people go on about, oh, well, he's so chaotic and all this. No, actually, up until the last week or so, maybe two weeks, when he was off the leash a bit, when frankly, I suspect they probably knew

knew from their own polling they were going to win this one. So he was just doing whatever he felt like. He was very disciplined and he kept coming back to this same question, the one that Reagan posed back in 1980, is are you better off now than you were four years ago? And all he has to do is point at his own record, which is that if you...

start in 2016 and leave in 2020, most people were better off. And if you do the same thing from 2020 to 2024, most people are either worse off or about the same, right? And that's it. And that's all he had to do. And that is a very, very powerful argument.

Into which you then throw this real stupidity of the mainstream economics establishment whose response to inflation is to say, effectively, we can't really do anything about this other than making interest rates go up, which is absolutely useless.

in dealing with the inflation we have, and then does nothing about the fact further down the line that stuff is still really expensive. And it's important things. It's the things that the inflation figures don't pick up on properly. If you look at the headline rate of inflation, it's the same in Britain, it's the same across Europe. This is how it's calculated.

It's calculated on the basis of a basket of goods, the average pile of things that the average person will buy. Now, first of all, there is no average person. No one's actually average. This is a statistical construction. If you look at what's in that basket of goods, it's like, yeah, it's like it's your food shop. It's you go to the shops and you buy tea or coffee or bananas or whatever. That's part of it. But it also contains a little bit of your holiday that you take on a flight this year. Well, actually, 50 cent people don't do this if you're in Britain.

or it contains a little bit of like how much on average you might spend on a flat screen TV. Well, most people don't buy a flat screen TV. They certainly don't go out every week and buy one where you'd have to do that if you're going food shopping. So your immediate experience of inflation is not reflected in the headline figures because those headline figures contain a whole load of stuff that you basically don't really care about, but you really care if you go to the shops and the olive oil is 150% more than it was two years ago, whatever it might be. Similar thing in the US, similar thing everywhere.

That is the experience that people had. And it looks like, and actually, in fairness, it was like you had a sort of mainstream of economic opinion and the mainstream of liberal governments all saying, oh, we can't really do anything about this and then put interest rates up and hope for the best. Donald Trump didn't say this. Now, he doesn't have a clear plan to deal with inflation. He just has to point to his own record and say, hey, it won't be like that, which is better than going, oh, it has to be like this. We'll just have to ride this one out. So that is what really, I think,

fundamentally undermined a whole stack of things that the Democrats might want to say about the economy was the inability to deal with inflation. And you see this effect across the world, by the way. The Japanese election, the LDP losing its coalition majority on the basis of

of frankly for a lot of people this is rising food prices the price of rice up 60 percent in the last year or so really quite incredible uh shifting prices of essentials you see the effect in britain where you know this is what knocks out fundamentally the tories yes there's a whole load of other stuff there but this is what really does for the incumbents across the world are hit

by this inflationary wave. They rely on a sort of mainstream economics understanding of what's happening. They rely on these institutions like central banks to try and deal with it. They can't deal with it. It looks useless. It is useless. Most people's experience is that life is getting worse and in some cases really dramatically worse. And that's not just a few people experiencing this. This is a mass experience of

That is what starts to decide the fact that incumbents across the world are losing, including now, of course, the Democrats or the incumbents in the US. Yes, I mean, it's interesting that point about incumbency, because that, of course, is being used as a reason to defend the record of Biden and to explain away the defeat of Kamala Harris. You know, the argument is, well, you know, incumbents are doing badly everywhere, as if inflation is simply the weather. And as you say, that doesn't

allow for the possibility of responding to inflation some other way. Just going back to the point about the headline figures, I mean, do you find it strange that it continues to be assumed by mainstream economists that governments such as the Biden administration would be rewarded for bringing the inflation rate down when

you know, people have memories, right? They're aware that prices for everyday items are now seemingly permanently higher than they were not very long ago. And so if real wages are not rising, then it's not a vibe session at all, right? It's a fairly realistic assessment that things are indeed pretty bad. Yeah.

Yes, people aren't stupid. They have to eat. And to eat in a sort of modern capitalist country, you have to go off to the shops and buy stuff with money. And that money is not going as far as it used to, right? The fact that inflation was 10% and upwards and now is 2% doesn't mean that somebody's turned up and given you a load of money to compensate for that 10% inflation. You lost that. That is a permanent loss. That is prices higher now than they used to be. And they're not coming down. Inflation going down, everyone knows this now, doesn't mean that

prices come down typically, it just means they're not going up so much. So you're being made poorer less quickly. It's actually the impact of this. And because that inflation is in the first instance experienced as inflation of essentials. So food is the most obvious one. Energy was the one we were all being hit with a couple of years ago. And by the way, this will pick up again. You can see what's happening with energy prices across the world. And then of course, housing, especially if you rent, especially in big cities and things, is your third one in this.

You need all of these things to live. It's no use thinking that flat screen TVs are much cheaper and much better than they used to be. And they are. That's true. Like, well done capitalism for churning these things out. The stuff you need to live is the stuff you have to rely on. It's the stuff you have to consume regularly. That's what you see all the time. And it's extraordinarily patronizing.

I mean, stupid. And you can see how it's played in and fed into a narrative. I don't think, by the way, for a second that the Republican side of this, the right side of this, were picking up on those articles saying, gosh, everything's great, really. You know, why are these people not understanding how great things are? America's the best economy on the planet. It's growing so fast. Everything's wonderful. All those articles in the Literal

liberal media were being circulated by the right because they could say very simply, look at this out of touch elite. Look at what they're telling themselves. They are patronizing you. They are telling you, you don't know what your life is like. You don't know what the experience is. They're out of touch. Get rid of them. And that's quite a powerful argument because you know, and I know, and everybody else knows what it's like if you just go to the shops and try and buy some food. It's absolutely fucking ridiculous what's happened.

to the price of basic things. That's same here, same across the developed world. And to have a bunch of people, to have the mainstream of the economics profession in particular, and I do think you need to point the finger at them, saying, well, gosh, everything's actually great. Our magic number has gone up and it's going up really fast. Why don't these bozos understand that is not helpful. And it's worse than not helpful. You could see, I think,

where the Kamala Harris campaign really started to go off the rails. Because actually, she did have the momentum when they did the whole, you know, swap season with Joe Biden. Yeah, there was a talk about price gouging. Exactly. You can see it. You can see what happens. It's like she floats some actually pretty moderate stuff around price gouging. Mostly it boils down to as much as there was any content there to say, oh, we'll deal with monopolies in food sales.

Good. You should do that. You should deal with profiteering around food. Yes, good. This is a thing that should happen. The screaming and the howling from the mainstream, the economics profession, and this sort of liberal centre ground, oh, we can't possibly do anything about the price of stuff. It's just, oh, how awful things would be. Imagine the shortages. Imagine the recession. Imagine, God knows what, they fantasise about the 1970s returning or something.

stupid thing like this. That is the bit where it turned for her. You can see it because that screaming and howling made them back off from some positive actual proposals about what a Kamala Harris administration might do that will help you personally and your family and the people you know. They backed off from that and they never returned to it. Instead, it was just sort of flapping about trying to, oh, it's a fascist. Well, if you've just elected a fascist, don't sit there and go, oh, we accept the result of the elections. Nonsense.

Like you say, oh, all right, well, okay, if Donald Trump's a fascist, you've just elected Hitler and you're going, oh, well, we have to accept the results of the election. Of course you wouldn't do that. It's not serious to do this. Don't call him a fascist if you're going to accept the results of the election. Clearly. And also don't invite a member of his party to become part of your cabinet, right? Or to campaign with Liz Cheney. Exactly.

It's infuriating. It's like you looked at 2016, they looked at 2016 and went, oh, do you know what? Actually, maybe this time around it'll really work if we do basically the same thing in exactly the same way with exactly the same mistakes, political errors all the way through. There is a serious thing underneath this, by the

way, which is the political institutions we have are not well adapted to deal with the kind of chaos we're facing, which is that this is not, for example, the last price surge we'll be seeing in some essential goods. And actually, if you go and look at what people buy in their food shopping, you can see they're having to go out and

spend more money on basic stuff. And this is happening because climate change is real, because, for example, the cocoa harvest in West Africa has been hammered by this. There's olive harvests across Mediterranean being hammered by this. The farmers in Europe are facing deluges of floods and...

really, really some of the worst harvests for many, many years across the entire continent. So of course, prices go up. And of course, because this is capitalism, you get profiteering on top of that. So there is a social structure to this. So we are going to see more of these price surges, which is also going to be a problem for Donald Trump. Although frankly, I think his administration, the people around him have a better sense

of the world being organised like this now, and some sense of what you might do about this, far more than this sort of extraordinary sort of mainstream liberal belief that things will just kind of revert to normal at some point, that everything will go back to being calm again, they can carry on running the world like they used to. It isn't going to happen. And frankly, I think the right understand that far better than the left, including the would-be radical left actually grasp that.

Do you think that the lesson the Democrats are likely to take from the election is that, yes, indeed, inflation was a problem and perhaps the most important cause of the defeat. But the implication they will draw from that is that the reason inflation was high was because of the stimulus. It was because of trying to run the economy hot, trying to get wages rising, trying to keep unemployment low. Do you think that's the lesson they will take?

Look, I've seen this argument already. And you know that this is how it's going to land, because this is a sort of an attempt to apply a mainstream view of what causes inflation, how it works. The problem you've got is that it just doesn't match the chronology. Like the inflation happens very clearly in the first instance because Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. He didn't do that because Joe Biden was doing a stimulus package of some sort in the US or the quantitative easing was happening during COVID. The causality of this is completely wrong.

So you can try and make that argument. This is what your little mainstream model would tell you is happening. And you can try and hammer recent history into that shape, but it's kind of nonsense. But of course, they are likely to go there because that argument actually protects this sort of

liberal mainstream core of thinking about the world. And really what that in turn protects is saying that, look, you know, okay, inflation is kind of bad. Our response to it will be the one that looks to make the cost of this land on most people. That's what happens if you start putting up interest rates.

This is how the thing is supposed to work. You put up interest rates, it becomes more expensive to borrow. If it's more expensive to borrow, firms find it less conducive. It's less appealing for them to go and borrow money to, for example, expand their business to employ more people. If they're not employing more people, those people are out of work. They spend less. That has a knock-on effect, which means other people are spending less. That means less hiring taking place. Unemployment goes up. That means there's less...

demand from workers for wage increases. And that is your mechanism to bring down inflation. You want it to be unpleasant for people because this as a route to trying to control inflation is the one that protects the interests of people at the top and forces the costs onto everyone else. So this is a disaster on a disaster politically, because politically what's happened is that most people are worse off because inflation, especially in essentials, has gone up. And

now you have institutions that say, we are now going to make it harder for you. This is what we believe is going to bring this inflation back under control. And that is going to protect the interests of the wealthy. And it's kind of as crude as that. So if you're saying, gosh, this was actually about the stimulus that Biden was doing, he overheated the economy and all this sort of thing. Yeah, that argument is in line with that general defence of economic interests of the rich and powerful that is represented by the liberal mainstream of economics.

Could you say a little bit more about some of the potential unconventional responses to inflation? I'm thinking both in terms of proposals that have been made, but also some real world examples that we've seen following COVID and the Ukraine invasion. I'm thinking particularly of Spain's unconventional energy price targeting.

This is the bit that sort of undermines the entire argument of price controls, is that the countries that did this actually have done okay. And various places confronted with this energy price shock in 2022 did institute price controls around energy.

Of a more or less successful and useful variety, Spain is one of the better versions. Britain had a fairly crude measure in the energy price guarantee, but it was a massive attempt to try and restrain price rises for households. Of course, governments could do this. And the sky doesn't fall in, typically, as a rule. By the way, price controls are used all across the world all the time. This is not like something that has utterly disappeared. The country in Europe that has the most price controls and one of the lowest rates of inflation is Switzerland.

about a third of consumer prices are under some form of government control there. It's very, very high. You go to Britain, it's like 10%. We do have various versions of longstanding price controls around, for example, prescriptions. If you get a medicine, this sort of thing is actually a controlled price. The price of NHS treatments is controlled to zero, for instance. This is not something that's completely unfamiliar. The challenge that we're facing, I think, is how

How to make this work in a way that isn't just pretty crude, like, for example, Britain's energy price guarantee that starts to build in elements of protecting people who are most exposed to these price rises more than people who can afford to pay a bit more for their energy over time, so richer households.

So Isabella Weber, for example, on the commission that the German government set up a couple of years ago with the idea that you could set a sort of minimum guarantee of consumption on energy for your household, above which the prices would not be controlled. So you control the bit that's essential to keep the house warm and keep you with the lights on and the rest. And then the bit on top of that is your sort of excess consumption.

You can start to devise, and there are plenty of schemes and plans out there, and even some direct experience in places like Spain, of how you can do this in a sensible and reasonable way that starts to do something about the inequalities that result from these price surges as well. So all of these things are possible.

And if you're still sitting there as a sort of mainstream liberal economy saying, this is impossible, we can't possibly do these things. I'm sorry. It's like in practice, this is being demonstrated. In theory, there are now a good bit of sort of work which says, look, this is what we expect is going to happen. This is how supply side shocks are translated into massive price rises for ordinary consumers. And it's a story that involves a sort of

And monopolization, in some cases, a temporary monopoly of that supply and being able to use that monopoly power as a supplier to force up prices to make everyone go out and consume this thing that they have to buy like food or electricity or whatever at a higher price. That's the story that you're starting to get out of this. But it's a story about exploitation. It's a story about super profits, excess profits. It's a story about power. And that is not one that the mainstream of economics is happy to confront at all.

Donald Trump, of course, is promising to impose tariffs, which could have the consequence of raising prices massively and depressing economic activity. He's also promised to deport millions of immigrant workers, on which so much of the American agriculture, construction and food service sectors depend.

And then some of the people around Trump are looking for extremely deep cuts in federal spending, although there are other people who take a more, you know, people like J.D. Vance, who argues for a more sort of chauvinist welfarism approach. But if the cuts were to happen at the same time as the other policies, that looks very much like a recipe for stagflation. Do you think that's at all a likely outcome? Or do you think we just won't see Trump going down quite such a radical and seemingly self-destructive path?

I mean, the basic issue with Trump, and it was the issue in 2016 when he was last as president, is the sort of uncertainty that he introduces to everything. The calculation is always often a crude form of political advantage. So that means that any commitment he's made to doing anything at all, and often contradictory commitments, you don't really know where this is going to end up. This is a sort of

squabble and bickering and crude calculation thing that will take place. And he plays into that quite deliberately. I mean, if you take the claims about tariffs, he's going to slap, you know, 60% tariffs, 100% tariffs on China and this sort of thing. This is a negotiating tactic as much as anything else. This is a way to try and use the clout of the US economy in a fairly crude way, given that you can't do it through the World Trade Organization anymore. You can't necessarily do it through the multilateral institutions in the way that you used to.

you know, a high period of globalization, neoliberalism, is US power is exercising this sort of nice way where you just set up the multilateral system. And lo and behold, you end up as the US at the top of this, and everybody has to agree with your rules, right? You can't do that anymore. So there's an adaptation to that, which is, okay, we're a really big economy, you want to sell us stuff, you're gonna have to pay a tariff. And we can negotiate about what that tariff is, right? So it's a way of leveraging that power, what

remains of American power. It's still very big. It's just not what it was. So you're trying to leverage that power. So where the tariffs actually end up, I think, is not really anyone's guess. You can sort of hazard that they will go up in Chinese stuff. But

But where they actually end up in terms of what he's going to do with the UK, what it's going to do with the EU, I think is an open question. And that in turn means that the domestic economic impact is also pretty uncertain. Like broadly speaking, you think that if you're putting a thing that increases the price of something that is being sold, the prices that people will pay for that thing will

will go up. So yes, that's an inflationary part of it, and potentially also a recessionary part of it, because you might choose to not spend so much money, and you might not spend so much money with the people who are importing these things, and it starts to add up like this. Ditto with the cuts. But again, given what Donald Trump has said, and given what he did last time he was in power, you think a lot of this talk about cuts and swinging cuts across the federal government and this sort of thing, great chunks of that probably isn't going to happen, for two reasons. One of which is that

A large part of his base, the base that he has successfully around the Republican Party formed over the last few years, actually is attached to the fact that he has promised to protect what is there on the American welfare state. Flimsy and not particularly impressive as it is, it's there and it matters to people and he's promised to protect that. The other bit is the kind of Elon Musk calculation, which is that you can jump up and down and shout about how, oh yeah, federal government's bad, we're going to get out of the way, we're going to cut everything. But in practice...

You have the majority of your contracts with one of your companies, Starlink, are with the US government, and you want more of that, please. And this is the other bit you see, I think, playing through not just in this election and what's happening in the US, but really across, in particular, the developed world, where

crude political calculations and access to political power are starting to dominate what happens on the economy. That becomes the calculation across the board. It's always been there in part, but once you have a relatively low growth economy globally, once you have this tight competition across the world for trying to sell stuff, which is certainly what's happened over the last few years,

you start to get that calculation on the part of major bits of capital that what they really need is political access and they'll work hard to make sure they get that political access and steer the power of government in their direction. All of which starts to point towards whatever claims may be made about shrinking federal government

Actually, the political economy of this is leaning heavily towards keeping that thing big and keeping the spending going and exploiting the fact that America can borrow seemingly without any consequences and to maintain that deficit, to keep the spending going, and then everything continues.

That's what US governments have done since the 1980s. Biden did that. Trump did that. They all do this. The only person who didn't really was Bill Clinton, to some extent, Barack Obama. But basically, if you have the dollar, you have the world reserve currency, you have a thing that is treated as incredibly valuable by the rest of the world, you can borrow cheaply, seemingly without limits for as long as you wish, particularly if you're the federal government and you can keep the show on the road like that. And I'd be surprised if the Donald Trump administration number two doesn't end up looking something like that.

Just turning to another possible factor in Harris's defeat, do you think it's plausible that had Harris taken a different position on the genocide in Gaza, that that could have made a difference, at least in Wisconsin and Michigan, where the margins look to be pretty narrow and that she could have simultaneously run on this, you know, very sort of Clinton-y, America is already great kind of platform. But at the same time, if she'd taken a better position over Gaza, she might have won in some states. Yeah.

You can say that the margins look incredibly tight in some of those sort of crucial swing states. So Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania in particular, and the two you mentioned are exactly the places where Gaza was demonstrably a factor in depressing turnout for the Democrats and also boosting the green vote in some places as well. You can see if you have to dig into the figures a bit, the third party vote is not big anywhere, but it starts to appear in parts of the country. So you can sort of make a case where, look, if the margins are that tight,

Clearly, this had an impact. And also, they sort of knew this was having an impact. It wasn't like something that, because it's been going on a year now, over a year, and it's been clearly, clearly something that is costing them, the Democrats, part of their base, right? That is obviously what's happening. And yet they rode it out and they rode it out and they doubled down here. And Joe Biden pretty much doubled down on the thing repeatedly.

In fact, he stresses how much he supports Israel. Everyone does this. Kamala Harris, in a speech at the Democratic National Convention, introduced to everyone, no vote for her at that point, but introduced to the delegates and makes a point of stressing that she supports Israel and stressing that this is critical to what they do. And yes, okay, some nuance about, oh, will it be better if they weren't doing a genocide? Well, yeah, no shit. But

It's still there and it's fundamental to how they see the exercise of power. So yes, it could have made a difference. And you can create a story where even with everything stacked up against them, even with the other stupidities I've talked about, you can see how that might have been enough to switch it. That's not implausible.

What's interesting is that they were still clinging to this thing. They still insisted that this was a core part of what they wanted to do. That, I think, tells you something about how power operates in America, how Washington sees its status in the world, what it treats as a really serious consideration. It gets you into that point of saying, look,

the actual differences between the Joe Biden administration and the Donald Trump administration on foreign policy may not be as radical as people tend to think. There is a great deal of continuity between what Trump did, particularly around introducing tariffs on China in particular, and using trade and access to trade as an instrument of foreign policy, and what Biden then did, expanding those tariffs, and then actually starting to turn them into domestic policy. Because once you have the tariffs in place on

semiconductors, EVs, this sort of thing, you start investing domestically to build up those industries yourself. I think Donald Trump is going to continue large parts of certainly the tariffs. That is clearly now going to be an instrument, a permanent instrument of US policy as regards the rest of the world and as regards the economy. But that starts to turn into a domestic impact where once you are doing the tariffs, you start thinking about how you support your domestic industries and the things that are being tariffed in the rest of the world. So I think there's a great deal of continuity there. And I'm

anticipate that you'd see that continuity remaining with Donald Trump taking over as president in January. I suppose another thing with Gaza is, I mean, you know, we see the argument being made that it was low priority for most voters. It wasn't coming up when Democrat canvassers were calling people. But nonetheless, it can still have had a sort of tarnishing effect where it made Harris seem highly unprincipled and morally inconsistent. And it can therefore feed into and heighten doubts about her regarding other issues, right?

There's that and then it's the lingering impact of the Iraq war. And I know this is like the thing you're not supposed to talk about because no one cares anymore, etc, etc. This is what we're supposed to think about Iraq, but it's not really true. Like there are a very large number of veterans and families of veterans in the US who have direct and immediate experience of what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. And as soon as you start parading, you know, members of the Cheney family, this is an immediate reminder of a terrible, terrible thing that happened.

that you have a direct relationship to that you went through. And there are millions of people with some version of that experience. And this is not something you dig yourself out of. So if you start to stack up, and this is, look, I don't, you don't have to believe and you shouldn't believe Donald Trump when he talks about what a great peacemaker is and all this sort of thing. But it becomes quite an easy hit for him to make the point that, you know, if you parade in the Chinese, these are the people who dragged us into Iraq. And he does make that point in a

pretty obnoxious fashion because it's Donald Trump, but he makes that point and it has a resonance with people. Gaza, I think, is part of what's going on with it. It's exactly as you say. It just ties into a general narrative of an elite that sits in Washington, that makes its decisions about the rest of the world, often with terrible consequences for you personally and your family and people you know, and this will continue. And that is what Kamala Harris is telling you. The centrepiece of her campaign becomes...

And I do think the turning point is around that, you know, the price gouging business at the end of October. Her centrepiece of her campaign becomes this is going to be a continuity with what was going on before. If everybody thought what was going on before was really good and I'm very happy about it, that's a good position to take an election. If people don't feel like that and they told you repeatedly that they don't feel like that, whatever your magic GDP number says,

If you are maintaining that position, you are making life very, very difficult for yourself. And it should not be a surprise that you then lose that election badly because you're associated with a bad, unpopular government that did the wrong thing for a whole bunch of people.

The failings of the Democratic Party are often described in terms of stupidity, the sort of out-of-touchness, which, of course, we've talked about and is certainly a factor. But there's also a view, of course, that it's a more structural issue. In a recent article on the election, Gabriel Wynant wrote that the pathologies of the Democrats are, in a sense, not the result of errors.

It is the structural role and composition of the party that produces its duplicitous and incoherent orientation. It is the mainstream party of globalized neoliberal capitalism, and at the same time, by tradition anyway, the party of the working class. Although he goes on, of course, to point out that Harris lost many lower income voters who either didn't vote or voted for Donald Trump. And we sort of see that when it comes to the early part of Kamala Harris's campaign, where

So as we've talked about, initially, she makes moves towards doing something about price gouging, supporting small subsidies for homeownership and so on. Then we see her senior advisors, including David Plouffe and her brother-in-law, Tony West, both of whom formerly held senior positions at Uber, urging her not to attack big business and instead to move towards this more sort of Clintonite position. Would you agree with that more kind of structural analysis and that

really, the Democrats are simply incapable of moving to a morally better position, but also one that actually might be better for them in electoral terms.

Yes, I agree completely with that. I mean, I talk about stupidity as a kind of shorthand. Stupidity is the outcome, right? It's the symptom. It's not the thing that's causing this to happen. Maybe on an individual basis it is, to some extent, but structurally, like this is how the Democrats operate, the Democratic Party operates. And there is a similar issue with parties of the centre-left across the developed world. You see it with Labour, which is now running into some of these problems internally.

itself in government. It's not that they are kind of bad people are in charge. I often think there's a...

It's become too easy sometimes to talk about ideology. You want to talk about ideology if you're on the left, because really what you're saying is these are mad people with bad ideas and not thinking through what are the structures. How does this relate to power as it is constituted in the country we're talking about, whether it's the US or Britain or Germany or France or wherever it might be. You have to think through that next layer of things. The reason that parties are sent to left behave like this is because of their particular relationship to the power structures in the countries that they're operating in.

The reason the Labour Party is, okay, it's now got no austerity until 2026 because it's under some political pressure to deliver this. It has to deliver something like that. After 2026, it's basically back to austerity. This is what the pattern of spending looks like. This is why you have the Democrats behaving as they do in the US. It's exactly that thing. It's like, yes, you are, and you have built up a mass base of some sort over many decades. This is your historic base of support.

But you also have to try and get, and principally, you're going to try and get the power structures to deliver for the people closely associated with them. And that's what you do first and everything else is second order thing. For a long period of time, that kind of worked. If you have easy, reliable economic growth, you can make that

balance work. Because if you have lots of economic growth, sure, the people at the top do well and they're fine, but you can make sure everybody else gets at least a little bit out of that. Life becomes harder when you do not have that economic growth. Now, the US has been in a very specific position for a long period of time now.

that he has exploited, very directly is exploiting the fact it has the dollar and it can run a massive federal deficit. And then it has had this secret bonus. The thing that the Biden people don't want to talk about, but it's true, is that it has relatively cheaper energy because of the fracking revolution across the world.

across great chunks of the entire country where you're getting gas out of the ground much more cheaply than the rest of the world and you're burning that gas you're producing energy from that gas and you're exporting some of it you have now become under joe biden for all the chatter you get from people around the administration about didn't they do well spending all this money on the inflation reduction act to invest in green technologies and this sort of thing okay sure fine but

Yeah, they did both.

So there's a version of the world where you go like, oh, well, actually, if we did rational capitalism, it would be better for everyone. And it's like, yeah, that's sort of true. I can see how rational capitalism, where it's like growth and it's balanced and everything's good for everybody. And, you know, it's all going to be like it was in the 60s or something, you know, that you can make that happen. And yes, you have more government intervention. Here we are, rational capitalism. Why don't we just go and do this? It's sort of Mariana Mazzucato kind of arguments. Yeah, we should just do a rational version of this.

Yeah, you could do that and that'd be nice. Or you can just go, and Donald Trump does this, run up the deficit, drill, baby, drill, and off you go, loads of growth and people are going to be better off. Because it's an irrational, stupid system that will work like this. And you can't sit there thinking that the only route to deliver growth is going to be the nice version of this, where you're doing the nice things, like you're building loads of wind farms and opening new factories to construct those wind farms and the rest of it. Incidentally,

One other casualty out of this election really ought to be that version of sort of left politics and left programs where you go, actually, the way to deal with climate crisis is to talk relentlessly about growth and growth of manufacturing jobs. And we just need loads and loads of these things to happen. Then we'll build loads of wind farms. It's all going to be good. Let's not do too much of this.

Because yes, we do need to do those things. But no, it does not create jobs on the scale that you really want to happen. It is not transformative in the economy in the way that you want it to be. And actually, if you want a program that deals with the climate crisis, you need to talk about the service sector, the 80% or thereabouts of people actually working and how that is going to look different. And that means thinking about how do you do care work? How do you have more people working from home? How do you reduce working time? How do you do these

sets of things that are not the big somewhat glamorous here's our great big factory making super shiny wind farms you have to do something much more subtle and much more under the radar but much more important and much more realistic so I think there's also a bit of an issue where I think there's been too great an attachment to like the

The climate crisis means loads of manufacturing jobs. I think Joe Biden himself says it pretty much directly. I hear climate crisis. When I hear climate crisis, I think jobs, right? I think he says it in exactly those words. I think too many of us have been caught up with that. It's actually, no, this is a crisis. It's real. It's affecting people now. It means higher inflation. It means devastating extreme weather events like those two hurricanes that hit the US Eastern Seaboard just over the summer in the midst of the election campaign, by the way, and Donald Trump still wins. That's what climate change...

actually looks like for most people. This is its experience. We need to understand that and adapt to it and work out what we're going to do, not treat it as like a good excuse to do a load of things we want to do anyway, which is invest in manufacturing and like get ourselves back to the 1960s. You know, somebody in 1965 in people's heads is still like the ideal time you want to get to. That can't work anymore.

Bidenomics in that sense did not work. It has not got that base of popular support that you would want to develop. It is not going to develop that. And by the way, this applies to any other centre-left government's thinking in these terms, including, for instance, that wing of the Obama administration that also presents what it's doing like this.

So just looking at the demographics of the election and who Trump did well with, I mean, one very striking thing has been this swell of support for Trump amongst young male Americans. And this obviously seems to counter this feeling that there was this sort of ineluctable progress towards younger people being more progressive in their views and that this would lock in a Democratic or left party.

politics at some point. Can you talk about that? What do you think is the appeal of Trump to young men? And what do you think the left can do about that?

I mean, there's a whole layer of things going on with this election, most of which are basically should be extremely alarming for anybody who sits themselves on the political left. And one that leaps out is exactly, as you say, this kind of loss of young men. The entire generation is what it starts to look like. I mean, literally, to the left and to progressive ideals, to socialist ideals, any version of that. Instead, clearly going over to the right and clearly voting in some cases. The turnout is still not super high.

for that and actively supporting Donald Trump as part of that. There's a complex list of things going on there. Young men and women are voting and thinking in different ways about the world, which is not something that always exists as a bit, but it's not been quite so dramatic. There's a big thing that's happened there, which...

I think involves, I don't want to say complacency, but there's a degree to which you could sit on the left over the last decade and think actually young people are sort of broadly aligned with what we're doing. And that's good. And you can see why they would because actually capitalism is not really delivering for them. So of course, they'll sort of lean in our direction.

That has happened. That did happen. And now we're reaching a point where it doesn't have to happen. You could sit there thinking capitalism is not delivering for me personally. I am a young man in a small town in America with not very much in the way of immediate prospects. Nothing seems to be working particularly well. Some extraordinary statistics on self-reported loneliness that, what is it, a quarter of young men in America under the age of 30 who are not married claim to have no friends, which is

it's tragic and awful that people are sort of feeling like this but being able to tap into that structure of feeling is I think something that the right in general without necessarily even being particularly organised about it have actually been able to do over a period of time and you can see it you can find in this country it's the same thing you can find anybody who has a sort of you know that teenage boy as they're the parent of they're worried about the sort of things that they're hearing and what they're watching you get it from teachers who have to deal with this appearing in classrooms you can see

see how this has built up over a long period of time. And it's not just the Andrew Taits and the well-known parts of this sort of, what do you call it, an economy of the right, this sort of manosphere or whatever that's built up. It's also like just these extraordinarily large number of people with just their YouTube channel, not a huge number of listeners, but it's churning this stuff out in a kind of spontaneous fashion. This has developed under our noses, and we have not had an adequate response to that sort of thing, which does get you out of just talking about the economics. You talk about that till the cows come.

home. To an extent, you just say, well, you know, capitalism is bad and these big corporations exploiting you and that's why your life is terrible, right? This is sort of truly abstract. It doesn't get you into the structure of feeling or the immediate sort of responses that I think the right can offer to this because they lean into, you know, what is a sexist and racist society and lots and lots of different ways you can lean into that and you can make it work for people and it gives people something to cling on to. What we need is some way of challenging that directly that isn't just

the kind of usual left response of some degree of nostalgia and basically sort of guilt tripping, which is like, you know, you should support workers going on strike. You should. But what if you're not a worker on strike? What if you barely work, right? What if you are sort of indifferently sometimes employed? You're not going to join a union, go on strike. Yeah, it'd be great if you could, but you can't, right? Structurally, it isn't going to happen. And it's no use just telling people that you should do this.

You have to offer something better than that. And that, I think, starts to get into what are we going to say that is directly about people's living conditions? So to get it back to the economics, if there's a surge, for instance, in the prices of essentials, the price of energy is going through the roof.

Your response on the left has to be government should intervene and stop this surge happening because they can do that. It should not be, wouldn't it be great to open more wind farms because in three years time maybe we'll have more electricity and maybe the price will go down. That is not the response you want. There's a lack

of an immediacy, particularly on the left in general, about how we think about the crisis, that we do not think about the immediate consequences of what it means for people, including lonely young men in America, as much as we ought to. And instead, we have some off-the-shelf solutions and things we want to talk about that we're going to impose on this. We have...

to stop doing that. The crisis that we're in is not going away because it's a crisis fundamentally of a relationship between the economy and the environment. We have to understand it in those terms and think about the immediate consequences, people, of what that means. So it's price surges. It's this

outburst of alienation and loneliness because nobody has a job and you can't get a job that's decent and secure and you're a young man, you're going to get that. You can't afford to buy a house. You can't afford to do a whole load of things that you're supposed to want to do. This is how it is playing out. You need immediate, concrete answers to all of that, not

fantasies about wouldn't it be great if we had social democracy all working again, but right now, what is government going to do? And that I think is a large part of the appeal of the right, because it gives you a sort of consolation prize of the sexism, the racism, the homophobia, the transphobia. It's your consolation prize. And at the same time, you have somebody like Donald Trump who stands up and it looks like he's going to deliver something and he makes the right noises about it. He won't actually deliver this stuff, but he's going to talk about it at least.

And we, if we like miss both sides of that, and frankly, the Democrats did miss both sides of that, we're going to go nowhere and we're going to lose and continue losing. You've been listening to Politics Theory Other. If you've been enjoying PTO and finding it useful, please do consider rating or reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts. It really does help to bring in new listeners. The show's music and graphic design is produced by Planet B Productions. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week.