Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

To explain the Democrats’ poor performance in state and local elections Tuesday, various commentators have made very specific claims: It was mostly about critical race theory, or mostly about Terry McAuliffe’s flaws as a candidate for Virginia governor, or mostly about suburban white women voting like it’s 2012 again.

But none of these explanations is fully satisfying. The turn against Democrats wasn’t limited to parents, or Virginia, or white women. Compared with the 2020 election, support for Democrats decayed across states, genders, ethnicities, and counties. Democrats lost because of something bigger than any demographic or issue. They lost a vibes war. Despite many positive economic trends, Americans are feeling rotten about the state of things—and, understandably, they’re blaming the party in power.

How are vibes any different from what we’ve historically called economic fundamentals? Can President Joe Biden mount a comeback after losing the first decisive battle of the vibes war? And why do we always have to name stuff?

The U.S. economy is booming. Kind of. Consumer demand is on a rocket ship upward, and Americans collectively are spending more money than ever on hard goods. The unemployment rate is lower today than it was for most of the 2010s. Having banked stimulus checks, unemployment insurance, student-loan-interest forgiveness, and other savings, Americans say that their finances are in excellent shape.

Yet supply-chain snarls have made shopping harder, and incipient inflation has made what we can buy more expensive. Independents say they’re as despondent about the economy as they were during several months of the Great Recession. One measure of consumer confidence—buying conditions for household durables—has fallen to its lowest rate in about 40 years. Gas prices are salient, not only because people buy a lot of it, but also because they’re the only prices printed in 3,000-point type across the country—and they’ve gone way up under Biden. Meanwhile, the Delta variant obliterated promises of a hot vax summer, and the president’s approval rating has tanked.

These days it’s good to be a savings account, or a nominal-gross-domestic-income graph. But bank accounts don’t vote, and nominal-GDI graphs currently lack Senate representation. Consumers vote, and hiring managers vote, and overworked service-economy employees dealing with rude customers vote, and right now it stinks to be any of those people. An economist can tell you that, technically, things are looking up. But vibes eat technicalities for breakfast. The vibes are bad, and Democrats are suffering for it.

For now! But we may have reached a vibe inflection point.

The U.S. economy added 531,000 jobs in October. This is a good sign that Delta fears (like Delta cases) are waning, and the service economy is going back to normal. As pandemic savings are drawn down, more people will likely join the labor force, which will ease the worker shortage and help companies fill out their staff. The supply-chain meshugas is not going to end before Christmas, but nobody I’ve spoken with expects it to last a full year.

Vaccine approval for kids should allay the fears of parents and help schools go back to normal, if schools and parents choose to do so. Young people are at much lower risk of severe illness than the elderly, but the mass vaccination of kids will help the U.S. avoid a repeat of what’s happening in the U.K., where cases are surging among unvaccinated children. New antiviral drugs from Pfizer and Merck will bring even more artillery into the fight against COVID in 2022.

Meanwhile, Biden’s new de facto vaccination mandate is a quiet economic-stimulus policy that, despite the controversy around it, really will make life feel more normal for millions of Americans. This week, the White House announced that companies with 100 or more employees have to fully vaccinate their workforce or test unvaccinated employees for COVID on a weekly basis. The Department of Health and Human Services also requires health-care facilities participating in Medicare and Medicaid to make sure all their employees get shots. Despite threats of mass resignations in response to these mandates, the reality hasn’t matched the headlines. In fact, vaccination requirements could result in more hirings, rather than more quits, as Americans fearful of infection feel more comfortable returning to fully vaccinated workplaces.

Wagner’s music, as the saying goes, was better than it sounds. Today’s economy is better than it feels. If 2021 was the year of negative shocks—Delta, labor shortages, supply-chain madness, and general shopping woes—2022 could be the year of pleasant surprises, when the economy’s statistical recovery becomes a bona fide vibes recovery.

Joe Biden promised normality, Americans got abnormality, and Democrats got punished at the polls for it. The path toward a more successful midterm election for Democrats in 2022 flows through the converse of this strategy. First, make things feel better. Then talk about it.

Mainers react to soaring energy costs

In my political circles, the socialist and activist left, the recent defeat of India Walton, a democratic socialist candidate for mayor of Buffalo, seemed all too familiar, even if she lost in an unusual way to the incumbent Democratic mayor, Byron Brown. Ms. Walton prevailed against Mr. Brown in the Democratic primary, but for the general election, he ran a write-in campaign to retain his position.

That outcome saddens and disappoints me. Like many admirers of Ms. Walton, I believe she was terribly mistreated by the New York Democratic Party, which largely fell in line behind Mr. Brown, even though he was not running as a Democrat. It’s not fair that Ms. Walton had to run against him twice, with the weight of a lot of centrist Democrats and Republicans behind him in the general election, and that he enjoyed the support of several prominent labor unions and much of the city’s and state’s larger party infrastructure. (Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand did endorse Ms. Walton.)

Nevertheless, I am willing to say something far too few leftists seem willing to: Not only did Mr. Brown win, but he won resoundingly (the race is not officially over but stands at roughly 59 percent for Mr. Brown to 41 percent for Ms. Walton); it’s time for young socialists and progressive Democrats to recognize that our beliefs just might not be popular enough to win elections consistently. It does us no favors to pretend otherwise.

What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular.

They frequently claim that Americans want socialist policies and socialist politicians but are prevented from voting for them by the system. Or they argue that most American voters have no deeply held economic beliefs at all and are ready to be rallied to the socialist cause by a charismatic candidate.

This attitude toward Ms. Walton’s defeat specifically and toward the political landscape more broadly is part and parcel of a problem that has deepened in the past five years: So many on the radical left whom I know have convinced themselves that their politics and policies are in fact quite popular on a national level, despite the mounting evidence otherwise.

As New York magazine’s Sarah Jones put it over the summer, “Should Democrats mount a cohesive critique of capitalism, they’ll meet many Americans where they are.” We are held back, the thinking frequently goes, not by the popularity of our ideas but by the forces of reaction marshaled against us.

But the only way for the left to overcome our institutional disadvantages is to compel more voters to vote for us. Bernie Sanders’s two noble failures in Democratic presidential primaries galvanized young progressives and helped create political structures that have pulled the party left. They also helped convince many of a socialist bent that only dirty tricks can defeat us. In the 2016 primary, the superdelegate system demonstrated how undemocratic the Democratic Party can be. Mr. Sanders won every county in West Virginia, for example, but the system at the time ensured that Mr. Sanders did not receive superdelegates in proportion to his vote totals (many superdelegates defied the wishes of the voters and supported Mrs. Clinton). In 2020, it was widely reported that after Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada, former President Barack Obama had an indirect role as the minor candidates in the primary rallied behind Joe Biden to defeat the socialist threat. There is little doubt that the establishment worked overtime to prevent a Sanders nomination.

But the inconvenient fact is that Mr. Sanders received far fewer primary votes than Mrs. Clinton in 2016 and Mr. Biden in 2020. He failed to make major inroads among the moderate Black voters whom many see as the heart of the Democratic Party. What’s more, he failed to turn out the youth vote in the way that his supporters insisted he would.

Whatever else we may want to say about the system, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the voters of the liberal party in American politics twice had the opportunity to nominate Mr. Sanders as their candidate for president and twice declined to do so. If we don’t allow this to inform our understanding of the popularity of our politics, we’ll never move forward and start winning elections to gain more power in our system.

This may be seen as a betrayal of the socialist principles I stand for, which are at heart an insistence on the absolute moral equality of every person and a fierce commitment to fighting for the worst-off with whatever social and governmental means are necessary. But I am writing this precisely because I believe so deeply in those principles. I want socialism to win, and to do that, socialists must be ruthless with ourselves.

The idea that most Americans quietly agree with our positions is dangerous, because it leads to the kind of complacency that has dogged Democrats since the “emerging Democratic majority” myth became mainstream. Socialists can take some heart in public polling that shows Americans warming to the abstract idea of socialism. But “socialism” is an abstraction that means little without a winning candidate. And too much of this energy seems to stem from the echo-chamber quality of social media, as young socialists look at the world through Twitter and TikTok and see only the smiling faces of their own beliefs reflected back at them.

Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard road to spread our message, to convince a skeptical public that socialist policies and values are good for them and the country. Which is to say, it will take decades.

Americans have lived in a capitalist system for generations; that will not be an easy obstacle for socialists to overcome. If you want socialist policies in the United States, there is no alternative to the slow and steady work of changing minds. My fellow travelers are in the habit of saying that justice can’t wait. But justice has waited for thousands of years, and we all must eventually come to terms with the fact that we don’t get to simply choose when it arrives.

Bidenflation

Consumers are still spending, despite inflation worries.

American consumers are dour about the economy and worried about inflation.

But that isn’t keeping them from spending.

Retail sales jumped in October for the third straight month, the government said on Tuesday, as Walmart and Home Depot both reported strong results for their latest quarters. The reports bolster the view that consumers are absorbing higher prices and splurging on a range of goods, from electronics to home improvement projects.

Rising prices were partly responsible for the 1.7 percent gain in spending, which was bigger than economists had expected. But even when adjusted for inflation, consumer spending is higher than it was before the start of the pandemic, government data shows.

The results highlight the resilience of the U.S. economy after a year and a half of disruptions, and the success of the government’s economic response in insulating many families from the damage of the pandemic. Helping consumers ride out the rise in prices, for now at least, are rising wages and savings balances that grew during the pandemic — in part because of government stimulus programs that put cash directly in people’s bank accounts.

In 2018, the NPR correspondent Sam Sanders made this modest proposal: “It’s time to put woke to sleep” — arguing that the term had passed its sell-by date. But “woke,” which has a longer etymological history, has only become increasingly common in recent years. What was once a popular adjective among left-leaning social media cognoscenti as part of the colloquial admonition to “stay woke” to various forms of systemic racism first morphed into a general shorthand denoting today’s left-leaning orthodoxy and then a slur that underscored the overweening, obsessive nature of said orthodoxy.

Last week, the Times columnist Bret Stephens argued that wokeness has been “clobbered” politically. That came on the heels of the Times columnist Maureen Dowd arguing that wokeness “derails” the Democratic Party. In the aftermath of Democrats’ loss in the recent Virginia governor’s race, the veteran Democratic consultant James Carville identified “stupid wokeness” as the proximate cause. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself an avatar of wokeness, tweet-dismissed that assessment by saying “the average audience for people seriously using the word ‘woke’ in a 2021 political discussion are James Carville and Fox News pundits so that should tell you all you need to know.” A couple of days later, she tweeted: “‘Woke’ is a term pundits are now using as a derogatory euphemism for civil rights & justice.”

Having arrived, then, at an intramural Democratic skirmish over the meaning of “woke” — and how much blame it should be assigned for the party’s woes — there should be little doubt remaining that progressives have lost this latest terminological battle. “Woke” is broke. The question is what will replace it.

As I wrote back in August, “stay woke,” an expression that migrated from Black vernacular to mainstream use, went from being insider progressive-speak to a term of derision for a progressive agenda. At its best, it was deployed as a catchphrase — often in hashtag form — to urge others to stay focused. At its worst, as I argued in 2016, it allowed many progressives, supposedly attuned to injustice, to signal their commitment to combating it without actually demonstrating an understanding of its causes or remedies.

“Woke” has also followed a trajectory similar to that of the phrase “politically correct,” which carried a similar meaning by the late 1980s and early 1990s: “Politically correct,” unsurprisingly, went from describing a way of seeing the world to describing the people who saw the world that way to describing the way other people felt about the people who saw the world that way. Some in the politically correct crowd on the left had a way of treating those outside it with a certain contempt. This led to the right refashioning “politically correct” as a term of derision, regularly indicated with the tart abbreviation “P.C.” The term faded over the years, and by 2015, when the presidential candidate Donald Trump was declaring that “political correctness is just absolutely killing us as a country,” “woke” already had greater currency.

Over the past few years, it has become all but impossible to use “woke” neutrally. It has been refashioned, like “P.C.,” as an insult. One could say that this was simply because of contempt for leftist ideas, even ones relating to improving lives for Black people, but only at risk of oversimplification. Wokeness, as a kind of ideology, has irritated so many because of the tendency for some of its partisans to see those who dissent from their views as disingenuous, antidemocratic and even immoral. To be woke, past tense, is to be awake, present tense, to a way of perceiving societal matters. But it’s a short step from seeing matters this way to assuming that it is the only reasonable or moral way to see. That latter assumption has a way of rankling those who see things differently.

Now, those on the left, from Ocasio-Cortez on down, face a new iteration of an old dilemma: A neutral descriptor of their worldview saddled with a negative connotation.

It’s easy to forget how antique, or at least vague, “liberal” feels lately. Much of the reason is that the term was tarnished by the right almost as much as woke has been. In an era spanning, let’s say, Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Newt Gingrich’s House speakership and Al Gore’s loss to George W. Bush, those who thought of themselves as liberals in commitment to nudging America toward ever broader embodiments of its ideals, especially those involving the dignity of all individuals, were tarred as unpatriotic sentimentalists dedicated to big government and with insufficient interest in family values.

Writing for The Times in 2009, Timothy Garton Ash hoped we might reclaim the classical meaning of the lowercase-L liberalism we learn about in college, espousing grand but abstract ideas such as “liberty under law, limited and accountable government, markets, tolerance, some version of individualism and universalism and some notion of human equality, reason and progress.” After all, who could possibly be against any of that?

But it didn’t happen. Intellectual constructs such as those aren’t exactly what gets most people to the polls, and conservatives sneering endlessly about capital-L liberals discouraged any consideration of more approachable uses of the term. Rather, when Hillary Clinton was asked in a 2007 Democratic primary debate whether she called herself a liberal — the rough equivalent of asking Ocasio-Cortez today whether she would call herself woke — Clinton replied, “I consider myself a proud modern American progressive.”

And even if Clinton might more accurately be described as a mainstream Democrat, these days it would seem that “progressive” will have to suffice to suggest left-leaning enlightenment without the overlay of snark.

That may feel unsatisfactory to progressives, even after acknowledging that “progressive” doesn’t lend itself as easily to rebuke because, among other things, it’s the antonym of “conservative.” To “stay woke” certainly feels punchier than “staying progressive,” in carrying an air of commitment to race issues in particular. Also, apart from explicit commitment to race, American culture, despite the racist biases in its fabric, includes a tacit sense that Blackness, and the Black lexicon, carries cultural weight or authenticity. “Woke” felt real, grounded — awake — in a way that the Latinate “progressive” and “liberal” never could.

Perhaps Black English will yield a new neutral term for wokeness. Two outcomes would be likely. One is that if it goes mainstream, some will object that the crossover is a form of cultural appropriation. The other is that sooner rather than later, that new term would come to be processed as a slur for the same reasons that “P.C.,” “liberal” and “woke” were.

So here’s another modest proposal: Progressives inclined to tar people for their perceived complicity in an assortment of injustices — for having insufficiently woke views — might temper their fervor. If they could manage that, a new equivalent to “woke” as a mere descriptor, with the positive-to-neutral connotation it had not so long ago, might last a little longer.

Pour one out for the old “woke.” It was fun while it lasted.