Populist Fantasy World
It's All About Lying
By John Foster
Consumer price inflation in the United States is rising at its fastest level since 2023.
This seems to have penetrated the Oval Office, as President Trump conceded to reporters that Americans might have to pay higher prices for a while due to the unwillingness of foreigners to take their tariff beatings like men.
Trump’s admission came only a day after he called for cutting interest rates to stimulate the economy. Of course, the only consequence would be higher inflation.
These points are worth mentioning for a couple of reasons, the least of which is that they illustrate the utter vanity of the nation that Donald Trump is a “businessman”.
The American president is, in fact, a real estate speculator, which, if he does qualify as a businessman, is a variety that doesn’t produce anything.
More importantly, this touches on another narrative favoured by major media outlets in the United States, which sees the inflation that dogged the second half of the Biden Administration as among the most important reasons for Trump’s return to the presidency.
This is a story that begs a lot of questions. One of them should be, but in practice isn’t, that if inflation was a problem for President Biden, why shouldn’t it be for Trump? The latter spent most of his campaign touting measures whose consequences would be inflation.
Tariffs are a particularly important example. There is general agreement among economists that they cause prices to rise.
Another idea along the same lines is Trump’s plan for mass deporting undocumented migrants.
Most Americans are at least vaguely aware the reason that food costs so little in America is because much of it is harvested by illegal aliens paid the lowest wages short of starvation.
At the same time, the United States has around 7.6 million unfilled jobs.
These tend to be a mix of service positions whose wage levels haven’t yet compensated for the current labour shortage and skilled positions, which are afflicted by a different facet of the shortage.
The proposition that further depleting the labour force by aggressively deporting migrants might result in downward pressure on prices only makes sense if one imagines white, documented workers thinking that cutting lettuce is a good career move.
With tariffs coming into force and at least some aspects of the deportation project becoming a reality, prices are starting to rise.
The result among the habitués of Trumpland has been a collective yawn, coupled with the more or less explicit view that higher prices might just be the cost of liberty.
The story of the negative influence of inflation on the political prospects of the Democratic Party was always implausible on its face.
It becomes more when one compares the case of the European Union, in which little correlation between inflation rates and the appeal of far-right populism gets media time. Particularly compared to uncontrolled migration, which preoccupies most of the press, instead.
Consumer prices have been higher of late, but inflation hit something like 12% in 1980 without electorates in the US or Europe going hard for candidates who promised to systematically dismantle the republic’s institutions. This sounds more post-Soviet than anything else.
The attempt to make support for Trump, or Marine Le Pen, and Giorgia Meloni into a rational response to economic difficulty runs aground on the fact that the economies in the EU and US have been functioning reasonably well over the last four years.
This is not to say that things couldn’t have gone better. Growth has been slow, and the patterns of employment that made one-earner households a thing for thirty years after the Second World War are well and truly over. This is a major political problem, especially for left parties.
What underlies the increasing strength of the far right is not legitimate economic grievance. There is plenty of that to go around, but it’s not what drives the movement. The symbolic chain driving everything forward is due to factors and issues of a much more abstract nature.
In the US, much of the Republican victory can be attributed to the failure of the Democrats to offer any policy initiative that might even slightly discomfit their megadonors and GOP success at mobilising Evangelicals and anti-woke sentiment. This latter point is a real irony.
It’s not as if the Democrats had put on a show of defending woke values to the extent that anyone can specify what these might be other than multiculturalism. Running Kamala Harris did little to compensate for that, particularly with minority and left voters opposed to the Gaza war.
The Democrats were perfectly willing to let LGBTQ+, trans persons and migrants go to the wall so as not to diminish their electoral prospects. Whatever it was that made the party think it could win over rightist voters could not have been more wrong.
The same situation is true across Europe, with a slightly different inflexion. This discourse is carried on under the sign of immigration, albeit with increasing emphasis on grievances lifted from the American far right, such as Giorgia Meloni’s obsession with “gender ideology”.
Every time an immigrant commits any violent offence, particularly in Germany, the far right floods the media with readymade narratives, portraying Europeans as victims of Islamic immigration, engineered by a left bent on a great replacement of indigenous whites.
That such allegations have no basis is of no consequence. European media, with certain exceptions, do little to dispel the climate of disinformation. Coverage of far-right incitement against minorities and hate speech pales in comparison to reports on immigrant violence.
This is the most disturbing aspect of contemporary politics: it’s not about reality but seemingly plausible conspiracies, repeated to death. The symbolic power of far-right rhetoric is devoid of correspondence with demonstrable facts and is left unquestioned, undermining social cohesion.
Here, the spectre of communism plays a central role. Marx was right. It is haunting Europe. The irony is that it has continued to do so in the absence of any actual communists. Imagine the opposite of far-right rhetoric, and we’re back to The Communist Manifesto again.
Those who do not live in the United States will, quite mercifully, have been spared the explanations, common amongst Americans today, of how Hillary Clinton is actually a crypto-Marxist. As crazy as it sounds, it’s a common occurrence in far-right media, and it’s influential.
It remains to be seen whether Donald Trump’s fortunes will change now that the economic consequences of his smash-and-grab of government institutions and his tariff policies begin to bite. Mass unemployment, it appears, could settle that, if not now, in the coming years.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.