The American presidential elections are over and now the fun begins. I’ll say up front that even though my preferred candidate lost, I accept the results as an expression of the will of the majority of those who voted.
So, by the way, did the losing candidate, unlike the winner this time who has yet to accept that he lost in 2020—but that’s ancient history. It’s what happens next that should concern us all, and not just us here in the United States. I have a sinking feeling that this election will have an impact on a large swath of the globe.
But that’s not really what has my head spinning. We can talk about that at another time. What is puzzling and at the same time entertaining me at the moment is the mental gymnastics the pundits are going through to explain the outcome.
Some pundits in the mainstream media (only a few) maintain that the refusal of American voters to elect a woman as president whose immigrant parents were South Asian (mother) and Black Jamaican (father) was not because of a tinge of sexism (primarily) and racism mixed with anti-immigrant nativism but because of the cost of groceries.
One article I read stated that Latino and Hispanic support for the winning candidate despite his record of demonizing (mostly Latin American) immigrants and the presence of a very unfunny comedian at one of his rallies who described Puerto Rico as a pile of garbage in the ocean, to the cheers from the crowd, did so because of the high cost of living. It goes on and on.
The motive for voting for the winning candidate was because of inflation and high prices and tangentially the broad wealth gap in the United States where CEOs of companies received salaries that are multiples of more than a thousand over that of their workers.
Here’s the problem I have with the pundits who hold this view. They are either wrong and are trying to whitewash the problems that still exist with racism, toxic masculinity, and nativism in the United States, or they’re right, and a huge percentage of the American voting population is woefully lacking in critical thinking skills. Consider this.
If inflation and grocery prices are what motivated voters, why would they vote for a candidate who throughout his campaign has threatened to do things that will only make those two things worse? He’s said, for instance, that he will conduct the most massive deportation in the country’s history, getting rid of millions of undocumented aliens.
In the first place, such an operation would be prohibitively expensive, socially disruptive, a logistical nightmare, and a humanitarian disaster. But, it would also eliminate over 15 percent of the agricultural labor force. What would that mean? Reduced food supplies and higher prices. Another campaign promise: tariffs on foreign imports (which, by the way, include a lot of foodstuffs).
Now, the candidate, despite claiming to be such a competent businessman, doesn’t seem to understand how tariffs work, or he believes that his audience doesn’t. But, tariffs are a tax paid by importers, not exporters. Sure, it might reduce imports from a given country because they’ve become too expensive, but those goods that are imported will cost more and the importer will likely pass a part if not all of that extra cost on to the consumer.
Oops! Food prices still high. Furthermore, a lot of those imports are not grown here, so that removes them from American menus. I’m thinking here of things like kiwi fruit and bananas. Tariffs on a country’s exports also often invite retaliatory tariffs or reductions in the things they import from us.
The last time we imposed punitive tariffs on China, for example, they cut off imports of soybeans and other agricultural products from American farmers, which had a devastating impact on their standard of living.
So, are the pundits wrong, or are they engaging in smoke blowing to cover up more disturbing historical issues that many in this country wish to ignore or deny? Or, are they right, and indicating that a disturbing number of people lack the critical thinking skills to distinguish BS political rhetoric from fact?
You know; either way it has my head spinning like a NASA centrifuge. | NWI
