Why 2024’s vibes are so perplexing: ‘Everybody thinks they’re losing’
Extremists regularly thrive when unemployment is through the ceiling or inflation is ravaging everyone’s savings. But whatever its problems, the democratic world of 2024 faces neither the joblessness of the 1930s nor the soaring prices of the 1970s.
That doesn’t seem to matter. Far from flourishing, leaders on the center-left and center-right throughout the democratic world are facing grave threats from far-right politicians — and none more so than President Biden.
The economic numbers tell us the president should be in a happy place. In its recovery from the pandemic-induced recession, the United States has outpaced its competitors. Gross domestic product grew at an astonishing annual rate of 4.9% in the third quarter of 2023.
Inflation was tamed without any sign of a widely predicted recession. Unemployment is at 3.7%, and real incomes are 2.7% above their January 2021 levels, meaning wage increases are outpacing price increases. If someone had shown you these numbers on the day Biden was inaugurated, you might have predicted he would be cruising into a Ronald Reagan-style “Morning in America” reelection campaign. Explaining why he’s not has spawned a growing subspecialty in the world of commentary — and a new word: “vibecession.” Coined by economics educator Kyla Scanlon, it refers to how people feel the country is in recession despite all that good data.
There’s no shortage of explanations for the bad vibes: stubbornly high prices for certain goods, coupled with high interest rates; lingering frustrations over pandemic shutdowns in the worlds of work and schooling; the long-term unease created by sluggish wage growth since (take your pick) the 1980s or the crash of 2008; large economic disparities between big metros and small towns and rural areas; and poll responses shaped by partisanship.
There’s nothing wrong with these theories, but the very existence of the word “vibecession” teaches us something: Analysts must jump through various conceptual hoops because economics alone cannot explain the political challenges faced by Biden and by center-left and moderate-right parties.
The rise of the far right, including Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, owes to the interaction between cultural and economic change — particularly the stranding of regions once dependent on manufacturing and mining. Issues around race, culture and what are imprecisely but tellingly called “values” have sharpened the divides between Black and White, immigrants and native-born citizens, those with a lot of formal education and those with less schooling.
The great Biden hope was that as a pro-labor and middle-class son of Scranton and Delaware, he could rebuild trust with workingclass voters who had moved right. He could also restore government’s prestige by showing that it could once again take on the core tasks of rebuilding the country’s infrastructure and restoring manufacturing work through investments in technology and green energy. And by doing some of his work in a bipartisan way, he could return the country to a degree of social and political peace.
The particulars are different, but centrist and centerleft leaders in France, Germany, the Netherlands and elsewhere hoped for something similar.
Yet across democracies, fears of crime and immigration have given ballast to the far right’s call for order, toughness and a defense of older ways of life. The political entrepreneurs on the right — again, Trump is a prime example — know that social peace and depolarization do not serve their electoral interests. The more polarized politics becomes, the harder it is for politicians such as Biden to keep their promises of a more amiable approach to public life. And just about everyone gets fed up.
If you wonder why there is so much political discontent, look no further than a year-end Yougov survey, which found that both liberals and conservatives believe the country is moving the wrong way — meaning away from their own views. Forty-four% of liberals said U.S. politics had moved further to the right over the past decade; only 16% said things had moved leftward. Among conservatives, 55% said politics had moved to the left, while only 15% saw a move rightward. (Moderates, appropriately, were split about evenly.)
Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux captured the mood. “Everybody thinks they’re losing,” he told me.
For Biden, there is still hope that interest rates will start coming down and the good economic news finally sinks in. He and his party will need to neutralize the issues of crime and immigration without splitting themselves asunder or feeding the worries they are seeking to quell.
The far right presents a particular challenge to progressives. “By their nature, progressives always criticize the status quo and stress the need for change,” Molyneux said. “But we are in a moment when our core democratic institutions are under assault. If we want change in the long run, we first have to restore confidence in the ability of our institutions to work.”
This, of course, is what Biden thought he was doing. He’s hoping that the threat his likely opponent poses to those institutions will help him close the sale.
E.J. Dionne is on X: @Ejdionne