Small Reasons for Hope

I wrote yesterday about what’s demanded of us going forward: We must be mindfully and compassionately aware of the suffering this incoming regime will inflict, especially to people on the margins who it is all too easy to not see, and all too tempting to simply ignore.

Today, I want to offer the slivers of hope I’m holding onto that America can course correct relatively quickly, and before the damage done becomes insurmountable. Only slivers, because this hope could be dashed, fully and quickly. We’re in a time when a lot can go wrong, and where the buffers we had against catastrophe are significantly weakened.

While we saw a swing to the right, including in many Democratic heavy regions, Trump actually got fewer total votes than he did in 2020. It’s just that the Democrats lost considerably more. One way to read this is that there wasn’t, overall, an increase in Americans supporting Trump, and Trump’s policies. Instead, Americans just gave up on the Biden/Harris administration.

The primary driver here, at least based on early information, seems to be inflation. It’s down considerably, and America weathered inflation far better than much of the rest of the world and has seen much better economic and jobs growth, but the fact is that lots of voters—who, remember, are not terribly well-informed about matters of public policy—remember prices, particularly food prices, being lower during the first Trump administration. They remember the nice stimulus checks Trump sent them, too. (And probably don’t connect high levels of stimulus spending to inflation, because they’re not economists.)

If this is true—or if it’s at least a large part of what discouraged Democratic voters this week—then by 2026 or 2028, they’ll have had two or four years to get more used to the inflated prices, and to forget the lower ones. That’s how people adjust to inflation. Prices don’t go back down, but instead people adjust their baseline.

Further, Trump has campaigned primarily on two policies: mass deportations and tariffs. Both are inflationary. Mass deportations will reduce the availability of labor, especially farm labor, and so drive up the cost of goods, especially food. If the deportations are sweeping enough, we might we end up with food shortages. Tariffs are inflationary because they are a tax on incoming goods, with the costs passed on to consumers. (China, contrary to Trump’s misunderstanding, does not pay the tariffs. American importers do.) The result, if the tariffs are high and widespread, will be a sudden increase in the price of many goods. Maybe it leads to more manufacturing here in America, but remember that one of the reasons we import goods is because other countries can make them at a lower cost. So more American manufacturing jobs producing the kind of stuff we’ve typically imported will mean higher prices for those goods.

H. L. Mencken remarked that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” The next two or four years could see a lot of that. Voters chose Trump because they were mad about inflation. What they’re going to get is higher prices, mass arrests of immigrants (including immigrants who swung to vote for Trump), and the likely imposition of large chunks of the Project 2025 agenda, which was so enormously unpopular that it polled worse in the public’s opinion than socialism. 

All of this adds up to the real possibility of a backlash, either in the congressional elections of 2026 or the presidential election of 2028. Of course, a lot of damage can be done between now and then, including ongoing voter suppression efforts by the GOP to tilt elections permanently in their favor. But a big enough wave can overcome that.

At least I hope.