Inflategate

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Kamala lost, so I owed Ben $20. I waited until payday to send the Venmo—because I was broke, and because I liked the idea of letting inflation work its magic, slightly but measurably eroding the value of his money.

So who really won?

(Ben. Still Ben.)

By now you’ve heard that inflation tipped the scales against Kamala. That case is plausible to me, especially because it is hostile to nearly all partisan narratives.

Inflation would be a convenient villain for small-government conservatives—if you can find any. (Honey I Shrunk the… Small-Government Conservatives?)

As the New Yorker recently put it:¹

Inside the daily chaos of politics, there seems to be a new invisible foundation: the era of the era of big government being over is over.²

In short, inflation is inconvenient. Inconvenient for Biden’s infrastructure and stimulus legislation,³ and therefore for liberals and centrists; inconvenient for leftists who regard austerity as a failure of imagination; inconvenient for conservatives who read their victory as a rejection of wokeness; inconvenient for right-wingers who lionize Trump. Convenient, that is, only for me—Genius On Substack. Haha.

There are three things about Trump’s re-election that I find difficult to keep in mind simultaneously. Thing one is that the Democrats had one job, and they shat the bed with the lights on.⁴ Thing two is that Trump’s Trump-ness made the Democrats’ one job ungodly difficult. Thing three is that the Democrats, while out of power, must now help ensure that 2024 is not our last free and fair election. Taking whatever help they can get.

Perversely, Trump’s clear victory might ultimately serve Thing Three—which is the only one that matters now. Had Trump lost, violence from his supporters seemed all but inevitable. Now—careful what you wish for?—they have to watch him govern.

Four years from now, voters might again be eager for change. And if they aren’t, or if there’s any monkey business, I for one will be in Washington D.C. on January 6th, 2029, protesting peacefully. Aggressively peacefully.

Times Square, Election Day, 2024

Losing this election sucked every kind of ass. That’s the cold fact of the thing.⁵

It is paradoxically difficult to win an election against someone who says, in effect, “Vote for me if you agree that elections are fake.” Persuading people of the virtue of your cause is hard enough without having to simultaneously persuade people of the virtues of persuasion.

Democrats could have excluded “Protect Democracy” from their platform, but if we’d excluded it and lost, we never could’ve convinced the future that such cynicism was justified. As it is, we can marinate in a signature pyrrhic victory defeat.

Trump becoming a politician is like when the British public voted to name a new government vessel “Boaty McBoatface”: once the idea of a joke becomes seriously viable, all serious options look like killjoys in comparison. (Volodymyr Zelensky, who first became famous in Ukraine as an actor in a television comedy about zany politicians, is a more palatable example of the same pattern.)

As a Cincinnati Bengals fan, I spend a grotesque amount of time thinking about the last play of the 2022 Super Bowl. We lost. Not by much. But I think about that “not much” so much that I can almost forget… that we literally and unambiguously Did Not Win.

For the record, this is an analogy between football and politics.

In each case, “what if” scenarios have a sickly allure. As does assigning blame.

Every new season that fails to deliver us to glory makes our loss more painful, not less.

But shit happens. Facing loss is part of adulthood, in all its rumpled glory. To accept loss is admirable—to embrace it, even more so. Amor fati, the ancients called it.

We are delivered each day an untouched field of hours in which to use yesterday’s defeats for all they’re worth. The task is to ignore the past, except for its tactical value. And, as we test new ambitions, to ignore the future entirely.

It is—impossible! But take it from Donald Barthelme:

How joyous the notion that, try as we may, we cannot do other than fail and fail absolutely—and that the task will remain always before us, like a meaning for our lives.

Here’s another football analogy.

American Senators are usually re-elected, and “reelection rates in the House have never dropped below 85%,” with “highs of 98% in 2004 and 97% in 2016.”⁶

In sports, this is called home-field advantage. Season after season, NFL teams playing at home win more often than not.

Historically, the same applies to our Presidents. Once they’re elected, they’re likely to be re-elected. From 1936 til 2012, 78% of Presidents running for re-election won a second term.⁷

But we live in interesting times. Trump lost his re-election bid in 2020; in 2024, the incumbent party was defeated for a second election in a row.

The really wild thing, though, is that this has been happening all over the world:

Since the pandemic hit in 2020, incumbents have been removed from office in 40 of 54 elections in Western democracies, said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University, revealing “a huge incumbent disadvantage.”⁸

If the NFL had a season in which 51% of the home teams lost, it would be a curious aberration.

40 of 54 is 74%. That’s an extremely curious aberration:

[NPR] looked at advanced economies that have undergone elections since 2022, when inflation peaked in many countries. Incumbent leaders, parties or coalitions in more than 70% of the countries we analyzed lost the presidency or prime ministership in the time period we studied.⁹

This includes “both left-leaning and right-leaning” leaders.

So—the geopolitical weather was against the Democrats.

But even more than that, the last decade has been spectacular for authoritarians and dangerous for democracies.¹⁰ A given candidate losing an election is one thing; many countries today are losing the ability to hold elections in the first place.

Rather than thinking, “How could this happen,” a better question might be, “How could the United States weather this crisis as well as or better than the sundry other societies caught in the same storm?”

Personally, I’m starting with more coffee.

Last week, when I wrote:

What if we instead handed the reigns of power to the next person who walks into Dunkin’ on Route 1?

What I meant was:

America runs on Dunkin.

Houston Street, NY, NY, November 2024

I have thoughts and feelings about Thing One from the beginning of this post: the Democrats’ mistakes. I also have thoughts and feelings about the historical arc of democracy. And thoughts (and feelings) about how individual Americans can best weather this political, weather.

All is forthcoming in the near future, and every new subscription helps enormously. My INTESE-EST gratitude to everyone who has purchased one so far.

When 9/11 happened George W. Bush said Americans should go shopping.

Let me be the first to say that, when Trump is re-elected, Americans should go shopping. For Substacks to financially support. Mine, mostly.

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1. New Yorker.

2. It hasn’t entirely escaped my attention that Elon Musk is talking about cutting government spending. To shrink the government, he first intends to… create a new department… of the government. Marxists, too, dreamt of the “withering away of the state.” To that end, they created a state that out-monstered the tsars—and promptly forgot to wither.

3. MIT.

4. Achewood.

5. Honest to god, I don’t mean this snarkily: all the guy wants is to see himself on television. If there are ways to make that happen that still involve elections, we’ll probably be okay. (The built-in countdown drama of regularly scheduled voting just might be in our favor here.)

6. Open Secrets.

7. Time.

8. Associated Press.

9. NPR.

10. Associated Press.