Man bites dog: the sorry state of the American Political Discourse

If society does not constantly engage with politics, populist pretend solutions gain traction

Man bites dog in the US

That the two candidates for the president of the United States would agree to a debate moderated by a television channel is a sign of democratic maturity. The debate itself testified toa level of maturity that would make an intelligent 10-year-old cringe, and Donald Trump’s performance called for amending the description juvenile maturity to juvenile delinquency.

Trump kept ranting about illegal immigrants. They are criminals, murderers, rapists, drug peddlers, and fugitives from lunatic asylums, said the former and would-be president. They steal American jobs, depress wages, raise homelessness as well as home prices, he said. Trump went on to accuse immigrants of eating pet dogs and cats, at Springfield, Ohio. The saving grace is that one of the two debate moderators fact-checked him, and said the city officials have denied any such beastly meals in their town.

Trump exploits White America’s racial anxieties. The proportion of the foreign-born in the US population is about 14%. Hispanics account for almost 19%, African-Americans 12.6%, Asians (including South Asians, but excluding West Asians) 6%, and people of two or more races, some 10%. Non-Hispanic whites are less than 50% of the population in the West, and some 54% in the South. The overall white population is about 60% of the total, and the proportion is steadily going down.

All those Hispanics are not the result of illegal immigration. The US fought a war with Mexico over 1846-48, and, at the end of it, annexed 55% of pre-war Mexico. Ancestors of the Mexican-origin residents of California, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, most of Arizona and Colorado and parts of Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma did not jump the border; rather, the border jumped them. Before the war, they were citizens of Mexico. After the treaty that ended the war, they became citizens of the US, without having moved an inch from where they lived.

Americans love their pets. Trump’s running mate JD Vance once mocked childless cat ladies, acknowledging, in the process, the important role pets play in American lives. By calling immigrants people who eat pets, Trump is portraying them as deviants, akin to child-eating ogres.

Trump, of course, is ill-informed, devious, and disdainful of the truth. Did Kamala Harris confront him with facts? After all, if immigrants were flooding the labour market, unemployment should be high, and wages should take a tumble. The reality is that unemployment is at historic lows, hovering around 4%, and wage increases have been buoyant, which is one reason why, despite the rise in prices, sales have been robust, and economic growth in the US the highest in the rich world.

Skilled immigrants add to the host country’s economic output — that is obvious. What about relatively unskilled immigrants? They also have the same effect, particularly in an economy in which the proportion of the workforce engaged in agriculture is relatively low. The work that locals spurn, such as seasonal farm work, jobs in tourism and in hospitality more generally, care work and retail, gets done at cheaper rates, freeing up resources for additional economic activity that native workers find attractive. Immigrants, in other words, free up local workers for higher-productivity jobs. The construction industry in the US desperately wants more immigrants, to perform the relatively less skilled jobs in the sector, besides the more skilled ones.

Harris did not try to educate her voters. She blamed Trump for killing a bipartisan Immigration Bill, riled him over the size and content of his rallies, and got away with it.

Take gun control. Democrats favour gun control, Republicans oppose it. School children routinely get shot in deadly school shootings, thanks to uncontrolled gun sales. Did Harris try to advance the need for sensible gun laws? She brushed the issue aside, saying both she and her vice-presidential candidate are gun owners.

The Biden administration gets a lot of flak for high levels of inflation and high interest rates. The reality is that the US government spent freely during Covid and immediately thereafter, to prevent mass immiserisation, as economic activity stalled. That pump priming led to sustained demand in the economy, and led to inflation, in combination with unfortunate supply glitches, such as no containers going to Covid-struck China, leaving that export powerhouse with no containers in which to ship their exports. If the government had not spent freely, incurring a fiscal deficit of 25% of GDP in the world’s richest economy, there would have been no inflation later. But then, there would have been mass suffering. There is a trade-off between averting misery and subsequent inflation.

Why would anyone try to explain such things to the voting public? No one has.

Biden has done some remarkable things to build new infrastructure, hasten America’s energy transition, and to revive high-tech manufacturing in the US. Carbon dioxide removal, the only viable course of action to prevent global temperatures racing past the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, has got a boost, in terms of the technology and of actual projects, thanks to Biden’s policies and funding. He gets no credit for such measures, and neither he, when he was the candidate, nor his Vice-President, have tried to sell this positive story to the American people. For Republicans, climate change is a liberal sob story to mobilise support for killing the oil and gas industry. In the campaign discourse, questions of climate change get reduced to support for opposition to fracking, the process of horizontally drilling shale rock, filling the holes with fluid mixtures that expand, cracking the shale open, to let the oil and gas stored in its pores flow out.

Trump’s climate policy is summed up in the slogan, drill, baby, drill. Kamala Harris said she supports fracking. End of the engagement on the subject.

Even on Trump’s proposal to levy steep import duties on all imports, the debate is shallow. “I got billons of dollars from China,” boasts Trump, referring to his tariffs on imports from China. Tariffs are paid by importers in the US, and borne by American consumers, directly or indirectly. Trump claims tariffs are borne by the exporter. Even the media does not call out this stupidity. Harris described the import duties Trump proposes a Trump sales tax.

It is only on abortion that the engagement was substantive.

It is not my contention that during a presidential campaign, candidates can afford to go into complex policy issues, although Clinton could, and so could Obama, to a certain extent. Rather, the point is that a society that shuns constant political engagement with the policy choices the world they live in thrusts on them, they will be politically naïve, and be presented with candidates spouting dumb slogans. Americans, on the whole, devote most of their time engaging with entertainment, celebrities, their own relationship problems, college sports, school sports, football, basketball, baseball, local crime and political scandal. The media outlets that offer readers and viewers significant political/policy fare are few and far between, and social media eat up a lot of time and attention, with very little by way of politics and policy on offer.

American voters have thus been trained to be dumb, and, not surprisingly, admire a presidential candidate who seriously claims that immigrants chomp on pets for dinner.

This serves as a warning for democracies everywhere, and their media.

But there is hope, at least for the US. No American leader ends his speech without intoning, God save America. God had better step up. The Americans themselves will not.