Angry America

When the video appears on TVs and computer screens, it will, initially, be shocking. Men in uniforms, wearing sidearms or guns drawn, will walk up and knock on front doors of modest homes. An unanswered door will be battered down with a heavy ram. The people hiding inside will be dragged out to waiting vans, crying, children screaming for their parents. They will be loaded up and driven down their neighborhood’s street and taken to a fenced compound, likely to be called a deportation center or camp. Family members will probably be separated as they wait for mass transportation to the border, where they will be frog-walked back to a country many of them had never even experienced. Possibly, to complete the tableau, long trains with box cars will wait on sidings to take passengers to unknown destinations.

Assuming the new administration can pull off mass deportation, there will be varying types of raids. Cameras will be invited to watch as immigration agents sweep into meat packing plants and small manufacturing facilities and reduce to custody the entire work force. Buses will be parked nearby and people, many with blood still dripping from their work aprons in an abattoir, will be herded aboard and driven off to unknown locations to await deportation. Their families will not know why they did not return from work that evening. Troops from the U.S. Army will patrol barbed wire fence lines of these internment camps spread across the American landscape, which will also serve, symbolically as graveyards of our “better angels.”

Whether the Trump administration is competent enough to even deport 500 immigrants is worth contemplating. The only endeavor he has not failed at in his life is getting low-information and low-intellect voters to believe his bullshit. According to the president elect, he plans to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to authorize the deportation of immigrants. The last time the measure was used occurred during World War II when the land of the free rounded up 100,000 ethnic Japanese and placed them in internment camps. Two thirds of the detained were American citizens. The law is supposed to be used only when this nation is involved in a declared war, but such technicalities are not likely to restrain Trump and the racist administrators of his xenophobic fantasies.

If Trump’s incompetence can overcome the deportation logistics, the consequences of losing lower wage labor will almost certainly have a sweeping downward impact on the U.S. economy. Crops on the truck farms of California’s fertile Central Valley, which feed much of this country, will surely rot in the fields or never be planted. There is no rush of Americans demanding they be given jobs bending their backs to pull vegetables from the ground or picking and loading the sweet cantaloups from the Pecos River Valley of West Texas. Jobs on farms and ranches across the country will go unfilled, prompting less production on family operations and force many to surrender to the spreading power of agribusiness corporations. Home construction, too, in a thriving economic climate will shrivel to almost nothing without Mexican labor, documented or illegal.

Anger appears to be more important to the American electorate than information. Trump was mad and that translated into voters who did not believe that inflation was under control, the country was adding jobs every month, wages were rising, and the U.S. economy was the “envy of the world.” Robust may not be an adequate word for how well the economy has performed under the Biden administration. Figures indicate the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has risen 12.6 percent during the president’s tenure and that more than 44,000 applications per month were filed for new businesses, a figure without equal in the country’s history, and according to the White House, about 90 percent faster than applications prior to the pandemic. The African American and Hispanic voters who crossed over to vote for Republican distemper must have been oblivious to the facts that, under Mr. Biden, black ownership of companies doubled and Hispanic businesses rose 40 percent.

People were grousing about the cost of groceries, and, in some locations, the price of gasoline. Yet the economic engine of the nation was thrumming along and there was no apparent need to change political leadership, which may be precisely why the Democrats lost the presidential campaign. According to a new study by the University of Chicago, a healthy economy always accrues to the political benefit of Republican candidates, even when they are not incumbents. The Booth School of Business analysis appears to prove Trump won because the economy is thriving. I consider this more of an indictment of the failed historic messaging of Democrats than voter ignorance, though there was certainly no shortage of vacuous decision making in the voting booth. Americans are convinced, wrongly, that taxes are lower and more jobs are created when a Republican holds office, and, obviously, are not sophisticated enough thinkers to link current economic success to the Democrat who has held the office the past four years. Republicans are, in fact, as demonstrated by the chart below, bad for the economy, and Trump has been the worst.

The Booth School analyzed 89 years of data on elections and the economy and discovered that, regardless of the incumbent, a weak economy favors Democrats and a strong economy augurs to the benefit of Republicans. The study points to the two biggest economic crises of the past century, which are the Great Depression and the Great Recession. Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to turn the economy around in 1932, and, in 2008, Americans chose Democrat Barack Obama to undo the crisis caused by Wall Street’s speculative practices. Voters picked John Kennedy in the midst of the 1960-61 recession, Jimmy Carter to fix a similar problem with the 1973-75 recession, and Bill Clinton when the economy got bumpy in 1990-91. The Booth School model effectively predicted Trump to win with a good economy in 2016 and Biden to be elected during the Covid-19 crisis, which was bad for more than just the economy. Predictably, then, Biden’s vibrant economy meant that Republican Trump would be restored to office.

The most disturbing revelation of these outcomes is the rationale used by voters; it is also a condemnation of messaging by Democrats and their inability to get out from under their brand image. The public believes Democrats are best to hold office in trying times because they will indulge in redistribution of resources and raise taxes to solve problems and provide social safety nets. Republicans get votes during strong economies because, as the authors of the study wrote, “voters are more willing to take risks and therefore more likely to elect Republicans, who favor lower taxes.” As facile as that sounds, it is true; Americans believe the myth that Republicans are better for jobs, economy, and taxes and that Democrats are big spenders and bigger taxers.

Was there not enough reason, though, to break the model with Trump? Had he not tried to overthrow an election? Was he not convicted of 34 felonies and adjudicated to be a rapist? Had he not bragged about groping women against their will? Did he not mock a disabled journalist during a televised speech? Had he not told the country that Covid would go away “in the warmer weather,” a falsehood that was partial cause to 1.1 million dead Americans? Voting for him was, I suppose, proof that presidential politics have become strictly transactional. Vote for me and here’s what you will get in return. Trump promised a secure border and a better economy, which meant his supporters had to believe Biden’s was bad even when it was not. Vice President Kamala Harris seemed to offer something a tad more amorphous, which was “joy,” and a renewal of women’s rights regarding abortion.

Other dynamics included the fact that not enough men could bring themselves to vote for a woman, maybe especially one who is of color, and an insufficient number of women were willing to cast a ballot for Harris. Trump gained in almost every demographic, including Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, and college-educated Whites. Babbling on about batteries and sharks and Hannibal Lecter seemed not to have impacted his constituency. The man was mad, about something, as was the electorate. They shared his anger but could not articulate why any more than their candidate. Nonetheless, America has spoken, and we have chosen disaster. The Republican dream of shrinking the size of government down until it can fit in a bathtub is about to be realized.

But Trump and his acolytes will also finish the job and drown it.