November 7, 2024

Hello and welcome to The Society Newsletter!

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Several months ago, we released a video essay titled Why Everyone Feels Insane Right Now. It immediately got a huge response from our community, and since publishing has amassed over a million views and generated over 10,000 new subscribers to our channel. These numbers are fairly unusual for an hour-long video mostly about macroeconomics, but looking back, it makes a lot of sense. The video centers on the gaslighting people feel when constantly being told they live in a time of prosperity and growth, and yet are feeling more financially strained than ever.

The video originally started as a breakdown of the job market, and the huge disparity between the numbers being shared in the news and the way people were feeling on the ground. A time of record job growth -- where? Rising wages and upward mobility -- for whom? But when we started exploring the question, we found that this sense of dissonance applied to so much of our economy that it had to be a bigger video. (Though if you want just a quick dive on the state of jobs, and why so many of them are terrible now, we also have a video for that.)

In the coming days, you're going to hear a lot about how this election result is actually "good for the stock market," or "the stock market will be fine." Know that this is true, but also not the point, and kind of how we got here in the first place. What is good for "the stock market" is often terrible for average Americans, and while investing is a hugely powerful tool for wealth building, that means nothing to the millions of Americans who can't even think about building wealth, and are just trying to put food on the table. America has always been very good at making rich people richer, and corporations more powerful. But growing wealth inequality, and the constant gaslighting of working and middle class people, will keep us in this cycle of division and chaos forever. It doesn't matter what some big, fancy chart says. It matters how people actually feel in their daily lives.

While I am devastated by the prospect of a second Trump term -- empowered by a republican Triple Crown in all branches of government -- I also find a strange level of calm from the totality of the election results. This was not a fluke from an unknown challenger, this was not a huge disparity between the popular vote and the electoral college, this wasn't a question of narrow demographic trends. This was a mandate, an increasingly broad coalition of voters rejecting the incumbent administration wholesale, following a pattern that has taken place around the globe.

And that is where I think we need to be honest with ourselves, if we did not like the results of this election: this was not a question of people loving Trump. Sure, some did, and were eager for another four years of his specific brand of chaos and bigotry. But if you look at the patterns -- including the vast number of Democrats who didn't show up -- you will see that the overwhelming response was not from hardcore MAGA fanboys. It was from average people who felt worse off today than they did four years ago. Harris did not do nearly enough to separate herself from the incumbent (though, for what it's worth, I don't really think she could have), and the party in power was ousted. The lack of ambiguity around this result, in some ways, could be seen as both clarifying and freeing.

In the day since the election, I've already seen a fair amount of posts along the lines of "people decided to sign up for fascism because eggs got too expensive." And while I think the tone of this sentiment is the usual kind of liberal condescension that alienates many, many voters, I also think it's kind of an important, fundamental truth. When life gets too economically strained for people, and we have every bit of data to know that it has, nothing else will matter. Even in the voting patterns on abortion rights in many states, you can see acknowledgements that access to reproductive health and autonomy are very important, but not more important than cost of living. There are undoubtedly many people who knew what a Trump vote would mean, and did not like it, but overall felt it was a better option than four more years of Presidential status quo.

The tragedy of this outcome, to me, is that the people who most desperately needed the economic change will be the people to suffer the most. Republicans have become increasingly skilled at pandering to working class audiences and ideals while brutally redirecting prosperity to the wealthiest Americans. Among the many awful things that await us, increased economic suffering for the poor and working class is very high on the docket. But until we truly understand that any "left" coalition which doesn't center those same classes will be doomed to fail -- at least, long-term -- we will be caught in this endless cycle. And we will deserve it.

— Chelsea