This was a great read. You're right that Tea Party–era fiscal conservatism is essentially dead (at least in political discourse! which can be different than the actual political measures enacted). It sometimes feels as if the alt right/Trumpian right have simply executed on a mirror version of leftist strategy: lean into economic populism, lean into identity politics (but anti-immigrant, anti-BLM, etc), and force the Republican party to adapt accordingly.
To your point about the incoherent Covid strategy in 2021—and how vaccine anxieties were downplayed by the left, leading to even stronger anti-vax sentiment—I have a book review coming out this Friday that discusses this!! One of the great tragedies of Covid is how the liberal "trust the science" approach created greater distrust and anxiety…surely this will have a huge impact on US and UK/EU politics in the coming years.
After the EU election results came in (with huge gains for AfD in Germany and National Rally in France), I went back to this 2021 article about how Covid has created these "diagonalist" alliances of health-conscious Green voters + Eurosceptic anti-migrant voters. I don't know enough about EU politics to explicitly draw a line here between Covid policy + far-right gains (and surely immigration policy has been a major factor) but it's interesting… https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/quinn-slobodian-toxic-politics-coronakspeticism/
I definitely look forward to reading the book review. In terms of Covid, yes, it's striking how much the messaging backfired for the long term. I fear what another pandemic would look like, particularly in the U.S., since the approach from the public health establishment clearly did not work. It seems cheesy to say but honesty does go a long way. The vaccines were sold as a magic potion that could make Covid vanish even though there was no way to actually know this, with speed trials conducted over the course of a few months in 2020. And then the left became very militant about vaccine requirements and splitting off society into castes of sorts - the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. This absolutely fueled conspiracy theories because legitimate complaints were quashed. If you were under 35 or so and healthy, why did you need a vaccine and a booster? Why couldn't you speak up if you had adverse reactions? (This issue proved personal to me because I have someone close to me who reacted very badly to the Pfizer shot. This person was not anti-vax, I'm not anti-vax.) And then I found, strangely, people on the left arguing employees should be *fired* if they refused vaccination. Suddenly, being in a union didn't matter, workplace protections didn't matter - it was all very distressing. We've mostly memory-holed this now (I don't know how many people openly acknowledge there were vaccine passports required, in NYC at least, for all public indoor spaces, a remarkable breach of civil liberties).
All of these unprecedented restrictions would have *almost* been justified if the vaccines stopped the spread of Covid. But then came Delta, and Omicron, and liberals are shouting for these measures that clearly haven't made much of a difference anyway. The real issue, as you say, are the long-term political implications. Anti-vax sentiment in the U.S. is much more widespread than it's ever been before. The vaccines that are tried and true, that due work, are now being questioned.
What a fascinating commentary. We so need to understand recent history since 2010. I agree with you about the death of austerity politics or at least the near death. My only disagreement is that I think the school closures were necessary, and that most of what passes for education in school is nonsense due to high stakes testing . Remember, teachers lives were at risk.
This is interesting and I'd like to believe it is true, but I find your optimism unwarranted. If the European far right is anti-austerity, this is partly just because the European center *remains* so strongly attached to austerity. Starmer and Sunak; the current German coalition (the Greens partly excepted) and their CDU/CSU opponents; Georgia Meloni and Mario Draghi: these are all pro-austerity politicians. So is Macron (although for structural reasons all French politicians are better than the Germans on this issue), and the question for LePen and her party right now is whether they'll stay true to their populist rhetoric or adapt to market and to Eurozone expectations like Meloni.
I think you are definitely right that here in America explicitly pro-austerity rhetoric is in abeyance, partly because the Sanders / Warren wing really did win the argument within the Democratic party about the size of the Obama stimulus. As far as I can see this is *the* big victory of left-wing politics in America over the past ten years, but why should it last? Biden is still president and Trump isn't even pretending to be a deficit scold (as Republicans generally do when they are out of power), so the argument is stalled for the moment. But there's a reason Biden's last big bill was called the Inflation Reduction Act and was scored as deficit neutral.
Recent years have reestablished the consensus that voters the world over hate inflation, and the contemporary left isn't even interested in selling broad tax increases (somebody like Yglesias really has our number on this last point). So I assume austerity will come back soon, perhaps as a way of criticizing the profligacy of Trump's second term.
I think your analysis is incisive and correct, but that the intellectual and material forces that have made austerity a consensus position in Europe (and Canada fwiw) are pretty clearly at work here in the US as well. We shouldn't take too much comfort from the fact that austerity isn't the focus of public debate at the moment.
Why would anyone trust the "Trust the Science" people? They were wrong every step of the way. 6 feet was made up out of whole cloth. Mask efficacy was practically zero (as we all knew before March 2020). School closures were most harmful to those who could least afford it, and the under 18 population was at no risk for COVID 19. The numbers are not even a rounding error.
You could still get COVID after the vaccine and the boosters, even after the "Trust the Science" people said you couldn't - full stop. This was stated with ironclad authority via "The Science" and corporate media - Rachel Maddow was particularly adamant. That's called being wrong, badly wrong, yet there is no accountability and no acknowledgment.
The life insurance industry is reeling and yelling from the mountaintop about the 18-45 cohort, mostly men, dying at unprecedented, wartime rates. This is all post covid vaccine - late 2021. No one seems to be willing to connect the dots, except for a very select few who were deplatformed and demonized from the start. Dr. Pierre Kory, pressured to resign, fired from two jobs, blacklisted from academic medicine is talking rationally about it. Listening to him reminded me of how liberals used to talk.
Additionally, the Vice President of the United States loudly declared that she'd never take a Trump connected vaccine. Shortly after, she was pushing the vax as forcefully as anyone. Why? What happened? No explanation.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Sunetra Gupta and Dr. Martin Kulldorff were all demonized and vilified. They were right, and the Great Barrington Declaration holds up years later. We in the black community are still reeling from irrational school closures, and the ripple effect therein.
I always enjoy your perspective, but it's impossible to overstate how the "Trust the Science" crowd was not only totally wrong, but is bereft of humility. I suspect Big Pharma is so powerful that the left is scared to go after its role in the covid vaccine debacle with the savagery that it would have back in the day.
Maybe it would help to form a national bank to replace the private cartel oddly called the Federal Reserve. The state of North Dakota handles its state bank well. Raising interest rates is an austerity program. As Ellen Brown writes, there are other tools to avoid and to moderate inflation.
This was a great read. You're right that Tea Party–era fiscal conservatism is essentially dead (at least in political discourse! which can be different than the actual political measures enacted). It sometimes feels as if the alt right/Trumpian right have simply executed on a mirror version of leftist strategy: lean into economic populism, lean into identity politics (but anti-immigrant, anti-BLM, etc), and force the Republican party to adapt accordingly.
To your point about the incoherent Covid strategy in 2021—and how vaccine anxieties were downplayed by the left, leading to even stronger anti-vax sentiment—I have a book review coming out this Friday that discusses this!! One of the great tragedies of Covid is how the liberal "trust the science" approach created greater distrust and anxiety…surely this will have a huge impact on US and UK/EU politics in the coming years.
After the EU election results came in (with huge gains for AfD in Germany and National Rally in France), I went back to this 2021 article about how Covid has created these "diagonalist" alliances of health-conscious Green voters + Eurosceptic anti-migrant voters. I don't know enough about EU politics to explicitly draw a line here between Covid policy + far-right gains (and surely immigration policy has been a major factor) but it's interesting… https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/quinn-slobodian-toxic-politics-coronakspeticism/
I definitely look forward to reading the book review. In terms of Covid, yes, it's striking how much the messaging backfired for the long term. I fear what another pandemic would look like, particularly in the U.S., since the approach from the public health establishment clearly did not work. It seems cheesy to say but honesty does go a long way. The vaccines were sold as a magic potion that could make Covid vanish even though there was no way to actually know this, with speed trials conducted over the course of a few months in 2020. And then the left became very militant about vaccine requirements and splitting off society into castes of sorts - the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. This absolutely fueled conspiracy theories because legitimate complaints were quashed. If you were under 35 or so and healthy, why did you need a vaccine and a booster? Why couldn't you speak up if you had adverse reactions? (This issue proved personal to me because I have someone close to me who reacted very badly to the Pfizer shot. This person was not anti-vax, I'm not anti-vax.) And then I found, strangely, people on the left arguing employees should be *fired* if they refused vaccination. Suddenly, being in a union didn't matter, workplace protections didn't matter - it was all very distressing. We've mostly memory-holed this now (I don't know how many people openly acknowledge there were vaccine passports required, in NYC at least, for all public indoor spaces, a remarkable breach of civil liberties).
All of these unprecedented restrictions would have *almost* been justified if the vaccines stopped the spread of Covid. But then came Delta, and Omicron, and liberals are shouting for these measures that clearly haven't made much of a difference anyway. The real issue, as you say, are the long-term political implications. Anti-vax sentiment in the U.S. is much more widespread than it's ever been before. The vaccines that are tried and true, that due work, are now being questioned.
What a fascinating commentary. We so need to understand recent history since 2010. I agree with you about the death of austerity politics or at least the near death. My only disagreement is that I think the school closures were necessary, and that most of what passes for education in school is nonsense due to high stakes testing . Remember, teachers lives were at risk.
This is interesting and I'd like to believe it is true, but I find your optimism unwarranted. If the European far right is anti-austerity, this is partly just because the European center *remains* so strongly attached to austerity. Starmer and Sunak; the current German coalition (the Greens partly excepted) and their CDU/CSU opponents; Georgia Meloni and Mario Draghi: these are all pro-austerity politicians. So is Macron (although for structural reasons all French politicians are better than the Germans on this issue), and the question for LePen and her party right now is whether they'll stay true to their populist rhetoric or adapt to market and to Eurozone expectations like Meloni.
I think you are definitely right that here in America explicitly pro-austerity rhetoric is in abeyance, partly because the Sanders / Warren wing really did win the argument within the Democratic party about the size of the Obama stimulus. As far as I can see this is *the* big victory of left-wing politics in America over the past ten years, but why should it last? Biden is still president and Trump isn't even pretending to be a deficit scold (as Republicans generally do when they are out of power), so the argument is stalled for the moment. But there's a reason Biden's last big bill was called the Inflation Reduction Act and was scored as deficit neutral.
Recent years have reestablished the consensus that voters the world over hate inflation, and the contemporary left isn't even interested in selling broad tax increases (somebody like Yglesias really has our number on this last point). So I assume austerity will come back soon, perhaps as a way of criticizing the profligacy of Trump's second term.
Fair point re: Europe, most of my analysis was trained on the U.S. right
I think your analysis is incisive and correct, but that the intellectual and material forces that have made austerity a consensus position in Europe (and Canada fwiw) are pretty clearly at work here in the US as well. We shouldn't take too much comfort from the fact that austerity isn't the focus of public debate at the moment.
But is this non-austerity sustainable?
Why would anyone trust the "Trust the Science" people? They were wrong every step of the way. 6 feet was made up out of whole cloth. Mask efficacy was practically zero (as we all knew before March 2020). School closures were most harmful to those who could least afford it, and the under 18 population was at no risk for COVID 19. The numbers are not even a rounding error.
You could still get COVID after the vaccine and the boosters, even after the "Trust the Science" people said you couldn't - full stop. This was stated with ironclad authority via "The Science" and corporate media - Rachel Maddow was particularly adamant. That's called being wrong, badly wrong, yet there is no accountability and no acknowledgment.
The life insurance industry is reeling and yelling from the mountaintop about the 18-45 cohort, mostly men, dying at unprecedented, wartime rates. This is all post covid vaccine - late 2021. No one seems to be willing to connect the dots, except for a very select few who were deplatformed and demonized from the start. Dr. Pierre Kory, pressured to resign, fired from two jobs, blacklisted from academic medicine is talking rationally about it. Listening to him reminded me of how liberals used to talk.
Additionally, the Vice President of the United States loudly declared that she'd never take a Trump connected vaccine. Shortly after, she was pushing the vax as forcefully as anyone. Why? What happened? No explanation.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Sunetra Gupta and Dr. Martin Kulldorff were all demonized and vilified. They were right, and the Great Barrington Declaration holds up years later. We in the black community are still reeling from irrational school closures, and the ripple effect therein.
I always enjoy your perspective, but it's impossible to overstate how the "Trust the Science" crowd was not only totally wrong, but is bereft of humility. I suspect Big Pharma is so powerful that the left is scared to go after its role in the covid vaccine debacle with the savagery that it would have back in the day.
Any charlatan under any political flag can tax and spend, or impose tariffs. Getting rid of "austerity politics" alone is no victory.
How do we make "non-austerity" sexy? Also thanks for not writing a condescending "the economy is actually great" article.
ha, yes - make social democracy hot again
Maybe it would help to form a national bank to replace the private cartel oddly called the Federal Reserve. The state of North Dakota handles its state bank well. Raising interest rates is an austerity program. As Ellen Brown writes, there are other tools to avoid and to moderate inflation.