News craziness

Through the miracle of the internet, I can follow US news media. In the past, I tended to avoid US media with a declared right-wing bias, like Fox News, because they were mostly spouting nonsense, as well as the most extreme left-wing sources, like MSNBC. As it is really hard to find a completely non-partisan news source in the USA, that left me mostly with moderately left-leaning news outlets and very few moderately right-leaning ones. Which, for many years, was okay. Yes, there was some bias, but I could filter that out. And at least these sources weren't outright making stuff up, like Fox News, OAN, or Newsmax. Unfortunately I find that even the moderately left-wing news channels are going increasingly crazy since the re-election of Trump. There are two main subjects that I find particularly galling: Disdain for voters, and crazy predictions of the doom to come.

Since the industrial revolution started in the early 19th century, most countries have a large population of people who make their living mostly from working for an employer. Whether you call them proletariat, working class, or middle class varies with time, country, and the person speaking. But there are some observations we can make about this class of people that mostly hold true both globally and over two centuries: There are a lot of them, they are leaning to the left in economic issues, but they are mostly conservative in social issues.

The US left strongly believes in identity politics, which pretty much completely replaced the older ideas of class politics. Thus Democrats believed that for example Latinos, or as they like to call them LatinX, would vote for them, based on their identity. That turned out to be not the case. In reality, working class hispanics acted more like any other working class population, rather than basing their vote on their hispanic identity. Especially Latino men flocked to Trump in large numbers. They didn't particularly like being called LatinX, and they didn't like illegal immigration, even if many of those new arrivals are also from Latin America. But even more importantly, they were more upset about the price of groceries than they were moved by the social arguments of the Democratic Party. Economic policies of the Biden administration, like student loan forgiveness, weren't very popular to people who didn't have a college degree in the first place, many of them from minorities.

While Democrats strongly appealed to women in their defence of abortion rights, they haven't been particularly nice or welcoming to men. Commenters from the left frequently use "cis hetero male" as a term of insult, and imply that all men are rapists and violent against women. It turns out that men generally don't like being insulted, and that a large majority of men is cis hetero. And that this holds true even for men who are Black, Latino, or from any other minority. The left-wing anti-men bias thus resulted in an estimated 10% gender gap, and 54% of men voting for Trump. I consider it possible that the Democrats got close to 100% of the transgender vote, but of course that doesn't amount to much, and several politicians of the Democratic Party are now back pedalling on transgender rights, realizing that it might have lost them more votes than won them.

All this to say that the US political left, and the Democrats, are increasingly a highly educated elite, detached from the working class population. They believed that because of their identity politics, minorities were somehow forced to vote for them. And now they frequently perceive the fact that the working class voted for Trump as a sort of betrayal. The disdain that many of these left-leaning media types feel towards the common man as a result of that "betrayal" is rather visible in the news commentaries. And I find that rather hard to watch. Some of the comments that left-leaning media made about minority groups that voted for Trump are actually racist, which is strange from the political side that says it wants to fight racism. And even more comments are anti-democratic, which is even stranger for the party that wanted to save democracy with this election. Note that the Republicans mostly fell for the same wrong assumptions of who would vote Democrat, and ended up making it harder for working class people to vote, which then ended up voting for them.

2024 was an election year in many countries, and it turns out that it was a terrible year for incumbents. Many working class people in rich countries were feeling that their government was handling immigration badly, with too many immigrants exerting economic pressure on the cost of affordable housing. It also turned out that regular people perceive the economy differently than economic indicators would suggest: Official core inflation numbers exclude volatile food and energy prices, as well as the cost of investment assets like housing; real people feel volatile food and energy prices more strongly, and also feel their increasing inability to buy a house very strongly. On the other hand, people have a tendency to believe that if they get a raise, it is due to having worked well, rather than just inflation. An economist would say that if you have 20% core inflation accumulated over the last few years, but your salary went up by 25%, you are better off than you were. Only, it doesn't feel like that to most people, which is why they often voted against the incumbents in elections this year.

There is of course a valid argument to be made that people who voted for Trump due to the inflation made a mistake. It is hard to predict how the coming years will play out, but at the very least it is obvious that an economic policy based on higher tariffs is more likely to push inflation up, rather than down. It remains to be seen in how far such a policy might increase working class jobs in America, rather than just shifting them away from China to other countries. But even this "error" of the electorate doesn't justify a left-leaning elite to treat working class voters like idiots. The Democrats could have explained the likely consequences of Trump's announced economic policies better.

Besides the disdain for voters who didn't vote as they "should have", I also find the general panic and doom mongering from the left difficult to watch. Weren't the crazies supposed to be on the right-wing channels? Now they are everywhere. Realistically speaking, people overestimate the power of government and the president, and they underestimate the power of the system, or what the right calls "the deep state". The deep state isn't a nefarious organization, directed by shadowy figures from the background. Rather it is a huge machine of administration that touches a large number of issues in people's lives. While in Scandinavian countries around 30% of the total workforce are public sector employees, in the USA the number is estimated to be around 15%, which is lower, but still around 24 million people. Running an organization of 25 million people is very difficult. Installing a layer of upper management for that organization which mostly consists of ideologically pure and loyal, but incompetent, clowns isn't going to help. The most likely prediction for the next 4 years is that the Trump administration will be shouting very loudly and not achieve very much at all. Bureaucrats everywhere have a fantastic super power to resist change, by simply not working or not prioritizing the change their superiors told them to implement.

Part of that is of course that Trump and other right-wing figures promised some stuff which is simply impossible. I had to laugh very hard when I saw that the one of the government agencies they propose to close down is the IRS. That could never happen. Since Reagan's "government is the problem" speech, many Republican administrations have claimed to want to diminish the state, while often engaging in policies that can only be described as "tax and spend". The US government has grown pretty much steadily over the last 4 decades, regardless of which party was in power, and even Reagan couldn't manage more than slow down that growth without reversing it. While it is possible that Trump manages to shut down the Department of Education, that would only result in the influence of the various states on education growing, resulting in more visibly "blue state schools" and "red state schools". The USA has 3.8 million teachers at elementary and secondary school level; most of them are progressive by nature, as you need to believe in community in order to accept a stressful and badly paid job like that. Firing every progressive teacher, replacing them by MAGA loyalists, and turning the whole US education system into a right-wing indoctrination machine is simply impossible. At most they can slightly diminish the left-wing indoctrination machine. Not that this machine was working all that well, 56% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Trump, as well as 40% of women of that age. Which then resulted in Millennial Democrats insulting Gen Z on social media: “Gen Z gotta be the worst generation of all time. Can’t read, can’t write, can’t add, can’t fuck, can’t joke, can’t dance, can’t dress, can’t drink, can’t smoke, can’t not elect a fascist conman.”. The left never realized how the viciousness resulting from their virtue signalling wasn't any better than the hate speech they accused the right of.

I don't want to give the impression that everything is fine. The incompetent flunkies of Trump will result in some damage to various institutions, and possibly trigger a global recession via a trade war. But both the hopes of the right wing and the fears of the left wing of change in America are mostly overblown. I wouldn't be surprised if even key policies, like Trump's "largest mass deportation plan" end up being fairly inefficient and small compared to the size of the illegal immigrant population. Just look at his previous term, where the "Trump wall" turned out to be mostly inefficient, and the Mexicans never paid for it. The biggest danger I see right now is that I will have to stop watching US news media, because half of them will spout lies about how efficient the administration is, while the other half will spout lies about how much of a danger the measures are.