I really appreciate the work you've been doing to bring attention to this point. However, you overstate the case to say that material conditions have no impact on political attitudes. For example, if the grocery stores across America suddenly stopped stocking enough food for everyone to eat, you'd find this would have a HUGE impact on political behavior. There has been anti-incumbency bias in many democratic elections since the pandemic, and this is probably not a coincidence. It would be better to say that material conditions must take on a social meaning in order to have a major impact on a social process like an election; nevertheless, this process of meaning-taking is at least partly emergent, and so it can't be entirely suppressed by centralized media organs. What's more:
1. The *change* in material conditions in the space of months or a few years matters more than absolute conditions.
2. When people are doing reasonably well within the expectations of living memory, absolute material conditions matter less than when people are genuinely struggling. If this is true, the "vibecession" would be something like a post hoc rationalization of culture war impulses that some people, for psychological and social reasons, may not want to or be fully able to articulate. If Trump plunges us into a major recession, our politics will change and it won't be anything like the "vibecession."
The other thing that needs to be said is that there continues to be a *moral* dimension to the Trump phenomenon. It may not have been decisive for this election, and public discourse may not always offer a satisfactory account of it, but, whether or not we like it, it will have social consequences, and our future political choices (and material conditions) will be shaped by it. I wrote about this a year ago before the election season started:
In this analogy of high school don’t democrats actually have a lot of the “cool kids” on their side? It seemed like conventional wisdom actually became “democrats have all the cool and popular kids but Trump has the common man on his side”
Politics is about governing. Democrats govern poorly, but they do reward their loyal followers, and punish their enemies.
Republicans are also bad at governing, they also reward their friends and punish their enemies.
WE are their enemies. Theirs is a state that exists within the United States of America—a parasite.
FREE LUIGI!
I really appreciate the work you've been doing to bring attention to this point. However, you overstate the case to say that material conditions have no impact on political attitudes. For example, if the grocery stores across America suddenly stopped stocking enough food for everyone to eat, you'd find this would have a HUGE impact on political behavior. There has been anti-incumbency bias in many democratic elections since the pandemic, and this is probably not a coincidence. It would be better to say that material conditions must take on a social meaning in order to have a major impact on a social process like an election; nevertheless, this process of meaning-taking is at least partly emergent, and so it can't be entirely suppressed by centralized media organs. What's more:
1. The *change* in material conditions in the space of months or a few years matters more than absolute conditions.
2. When people are doing reasonably well within the expectations of living memory, absolute material conditions matter less than when people are genuinely struggling. If this is true, the "vibecession" would be something like a post hoc rationalization of culture war impulses that some people, for psychological and social reasons, may not want to or be fully able to articulate. If Trump plunges us into a major recession, our politics will change and it won't be anything like the "vibecession."
The other thing that needs to be said is that there continues to be a *moral* dimension to the Trump phenomenon. It may not have been decisive for this election, and public discourse may not always offer a satisfactory account of it, but, whether or not we like it, it will have social consequences, and our future political choices (and material conditions) will be shaped by it. I wrote about this a year ago before the election season started:
https://www.arcdigital.media/p/that-you-havent-been-told
Taylor Swift
Beyoncé
Steph Curry
John Legend
Cardi B
So many more
In this analogy of high school don’t democrats actually have a lot of the “cool kids” on their side? It seemed like conventional wisdom actually became “democrats have all the cool and popular kids but Trump has the common man on his side”