Pandemic fueling populism that elected Trump in 2016
The Biden campaign is hoping the COVID-19 pandemic will serve as a brake on the populism that propelled Donald Trump to the White House. In a time of crisis, the thinking goes, Americans will lose their appetite for political disrupters and come to a renewed appreciation for the steady hand of experts who can guide us through the storm.
If anything, the opposite is likely to be true. When the after-action reports for this pandemic are written, the elites are not going to come out looking very good. Why is America in lockdown today? Because despite more than 15 years of warnings that a pandemic was coming, the political establishment in Washington failed to prepare for its arrival — leaving us with inexcusable shortages of masks, gowns, protective equipment and ventilators. And the same politicians who led the drive for globalization — sending millions of manufacturing jobs overseas — also let our supply chains for critical drugs and medical supplies move abroad, leaving us scrambling to ramp up domestic production while the virus raged. The experts who for decades said we could manage China’s rise by integrating Beijing into the global economy left us dangerously dependent on a brutal totalitarian regime.
That’s not all. To contain the virus early and prevent the need for broad population-based mitigation measures, we needed to get testing in place quickly. But the experts blew it.
As a result, we are now experiencing the worst economic devastation since the Great Depression, with more than 33 million Americans losing their jobs in just six weeks. The brunt of the damage is not being borne by the elites who work in the information economy but by those at the middle and the bottom of the economic ladder — forgotten Americans who were finally doing better under President Trump until this crisis arrived. Before the pandemic, the U.S. economy added a half-million manufacturing jobs and low-wage workers were experiencing the fastest pay increases. Most of that progress has been wiped out.
For these Americans, today’s lockdown seems like a return to the nightmare they experienced following the 2008 financial crisis, when they saw persistent job losses coupled with a dramatic rise in deaths of despair — suicides, alcohol and opioid abuse, drug overdoses and chronic diseases concentrated in economically distressed regions of the country. Nobody in Washington seemed to care about their struggles, until Trump came along and promised to fight for them.
These Americans see the same elites dismissing their suffering again — insisting we must continue draconian lockdown measures that are putting them on the brink of ruin. They see the contempt of the media elites who mock the anti-lockdown protests (look at those rubes, they’re not even social distancing while they march!) and who heap scorn on Trump for his focus on reopening the economy. The message they get is: The elites don’t understand the devastation I am experiencing, but Trump does.
The idea that Americans are going to reward the elites who failed to prepare for and manage this pandemic is a fantasy. To the contrary, the longer this lockdown continues, the more likely it is we will experience a growing populist rebellion against the elites who insist we must continue to impose wreckage on the economy indefinitely. Indeed, the forgotten Americans whose lives and livelihoods are being annihilated may well decide there has never been more need for disruption in Washington than there is today.