Tariffs, EU, and election Post Mortems
Mrs KarlLB has asked a question.
It seems that a lot of people are discovering, after the US election, that an import tariff is something you pay to import something, not something the exporter pays in order to send it to you.
Similarly, a lot of people learned after the 2016 Brexit vote what the EU actually is and what it does.
The question is - why didn't the Democrat/Remain campaigns successfully address these misconceptions? I can't speak for the US election except inasmuch as I hear people only now learning how tariffs work, and time clouds my memory of the Brexit vote, except that I don't recall much being said about the incoming Northern Ireland border problem.
It seems that a lot of people are discovering, after the US election, that an import tariff is something you pay to import something, not something the exporter pays in order to send it to you.
Similarly, a lot of people learned after the 2016 Brexit vote what the EU actually is and what it does.
The question is - why didn't the Democrat/Remain campaigns successfully address these misconceptions? I can't speak for the US election except inasmuch as I hear people only now learning how tariffs work, and time clouds my memory of the Brexit vote, except that I don't recall much being said about the incoming Northern Ireland border problem.
Comments
As for NI - most of the UK population has no clue and is not interested. Anyone under about 40 that I meet is unsure to the point of not understanding what might happen if you needed a doctor in Dublin, or Belfast, and in what currency you might pay for that experience.
And as for why the democrats could not educate the voting public - much of the voting public seems keen (in US and UK) to vote for a demagogue (Trump, Farage) who will broadcast their fears and prejudices and hate those they hate with the strength of the state and the force of the subverted law. There was a joke about Carter ('let's talk improved gas mileage') vs Reagan ('bomb the bastards, let's kill them all') which seems apposite.
Only when ignorance is not pandered to, and worshipped as "authentic" and "real" and not the "middle class expert" nonsense we all hate don't we? will this problem be solved.
Have you ever read the coverage of an industry you are familiar with that bears no resemblance to reality?
The key phrase in that statement is "anyone who would listen", because a lot of people seemed unwilling to listen. Over the last couple of months I've seen lots of stuff online shared by friends in the US describing in detail the problems that imposing tariffs would cause to the US economy, but again it seems that the people who were listening were those not going to vote Trump. I didn't see the phrase "project fear" used in relation to the recent US election, but the effect of dismissing the warnings of multiple experts which in 2016 was labelled "project fear" here seems to have analogous examples with warnings about the impact of tariffs, deporting workers, ignoring impact on the climate etc of the proposals of the Trump campaign seems very similar.
As in much of life, there'll be a sizeable number of people who in a few years can point to what they were telling people before the election and say "we told you so". By that stage it'll be too late and the damage caused in a few months will take many years to repair.
I didn't hear the remain side making that point. Nor, therefore I conclude, did lots of other people.
The question then is why did people not hear it if it was being said?
I freely admit I didn't understand the economic and financial side of Brexit much when I voted - I voted predominantly on anti-racist grounds. It was only afterwards that I started to understand the full horror for the economy and trade - I swapped The Guardian for the Financial Times to educate myself because some of those issues were hard to understand and I felt I needed to know more and I realised I didn't know basic stuff about customs unions and the single market. But an FT sub is costly and I was both able to afford it and willing to put in time to read stuff that wasn't for my entertainment and relaxation.
If you then add in the way right wing propaganda aims to muddy the waters on complicated stuff with simplistic (and often flat out wrong) assertions then good information and the money to pay for it and time to consume it starts to become out of people's reach - unaffordable and people often dont have the 'spoons' or bandwidth to spend finding and studying stuff.
Even media that isn't setting out to lie makes assumptions about people's attention span and what they can understand and cares about ratings- so will shy from difficult and dry stuff. Back in the day before Brexit, it was also hard to find explanations that went into the nitty gritty on how Lansley's NHS reforms were meant to work. I was clued up on that by a person who was a specialist working for BUPA who needed professionally to be across it but I wasnt finding that in the papers and on radio.
Then you have the problem of ideas of balance and impartiality in media which weren't set up to deal with outright confident malicious concerted lying on a grand scale. If one option is a stale slice of bread and the other is a pile of dogshit and broken glass and the presenter treats both as equally deserving wholesome and edible - you get distortion. Sometimes to show 'balance' they will go wild on how unappetising the bread is as if it is equivalent to the other or worse, so they can't be accused of 'bias'.
I think its really hard to address these kinds of information deserts and deficit in an election campaign.
I also think we're pretty much fucked until we address the fact that most of our media and social media is pumped full of sewage and junk and then we expect ourselves to make good decisions off the back of it.
This is also why the problem is the media's. They don't question the message - they just report it. We need media that is prepared to question what politicians are saying, not treat the two sides as being as equivalent as sports teams. If one is lying and one is telling the truth, measured against reality, they are NOT equivalent, and media that treats them as equivalent IS the problem.
Yes, but you can't then complain that they don't accept that they are better off - because they aren't.
And it's not true to say that he could have done nothing on corporate profiteering, apart from anything else he could have made it a talking point.
This is not to say that Biden wasn't/isn't unduly influenced by corporate voices - of course he is. But anyone who thinks that a vote for Trump will improve this is incapable of digesting reality on any level.
The dominant story seems to be one of voters staying away, rather than switching. So the messaging to a hypothetical swing voter was one of 'things will stay the same because they are great' even if they didn't think things were great. At which point they conclude that both candidates may be lying but at least one of them is offering to change things.
And where was the influence? And it's not true to say that there's nothing governments can do to control things - Liz Warren even proposed a draft act against price gouging earlier in the year - there's been a fair amount of thinking done in this area among economists.
That a statement is unpersuasive is not the same as it being untrue. You've made this same point many times over the years but I don't recall you disputing the substance, only the optics.
Examples
The Ferret https://theferret.scot/ Scottish based environment and social justice news - does investigations
Assigned Media - American trans journalists debunking anti-trans propaganda
https://www.assignedmedia.org/
Melissa Sigodo's The Source - round up of stories from Black, Asian and Arab communities
https://melissasigodothesource.substack.com
And Michael MacLeod's Edinburgh Minute
Local and community news stories gathered
https://edinburghminute.substack.com/
I'm just resigned that there's no one-stop shop that does what I need.
This speaks to what @Ruth said earlier and on another thread: most Americans do not understand how the economy works. Pair that with what @KarlLB has elucidated, that the economy can, in fact, be doing better, even booming, but the Worker side of it receive very little. So people decide (a) the economy isn't really doing better, (b) Biden must be lying about it and Dem economic policies don't work, & (c) Tr*mp know's what's really up, and it includes immigrants*.
To that end, the grievance aspect on the Right is huge, and MAGA just wants somebody to be punished, punishment equaling justice because despite claiming to have Christianity on their side, the Evangelical Right particularly seek Old Testament retribution for inferred wrongdoing, not grace, forgiveness and repentance, unless it's for Tr*mp himself (despite him saying repeatedly he didn't have anything in his life he really needed to ask forgiveness for). Cut to Tr*mp saying incessantly he's going to punish foreign companies, who he tells his tribe are complicit in their personal struggles. So, another Trade War is coming, and since some of us do understand how tariff work, we know we'll all pay more in the end, because it's end-consumers who actually pay for tariffs.
To Mrs. @KarlLB's question, the Pod Save America podcast crew have an analysis about this, which is, in a nutshell: Democratic Party messaging re: economic issues were on-point during the Obama campaigns, but have since been soft-pedaled or abandoned in favor of other arguments, not the least of which is Tr*mp's fetid person. Sen. Bernie Sanders has fleshed this out a little, and the guys cite him, too.
*most Americans don't know how immigration works either
It's more both more complicated and simpler than that. Trump won because he took Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The "Good Old Days" that Trump sells tarriffs as an answer to is referenced as the 1950 - 1972 period where https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuthers_Treaty_of_Detroitreigned. That period was ended by the rise of imports, the Oil Crisis and accelerated by the US Dollar's status as a reserve currency. That gave rise to deindustrialization and the Rust Belt, including the three named states. What pro-tarriff Trump voters want is import substitution wherein American production is substituted for imports and an end to the role of the US as the world's Consumer of Last Resort. That has left these states worse off with higher unemployment and far more precarious employment.
Trump is the first president and presidential candidate in living memory to address this issue head-on with a method that has been suggested for 50 years: tarriffs.
The US Dollar's reserve currency status lets the US import without needing counterveiling exports which leads to consumption without internal production. The voters in those states were tired of that.
Except the end state is over-determined. It's also caused by the accompanying stripping back of workers rights and financialisation of both business and the economy more generally (consumer finance substituting for higher wages).
There's also no going back to the previous state; manufacturing is mostly automated these days, and absent workers rights there isn't going to be a rise in the share of GDP going to wages.
Lastly, the previous bargain was bought at the cost of excluding large numbers of workers (African American workers most notably, but also many workers in the South) - even at the high point of union density, only 35% of American workers were in unions, and a slightly smaller subset of these were in well paid skilled manufacturing jobs.
In a democracy, all that really matters is whether people vote for you or not. Calling them stupid or greedy if they don’t agree with you is never going to get them to vote for you.
It’s all optics. And it will be for as long as everyone’s vote counts the same as everyone else’s.
That is not true on the last point. Operation Dixie was the great attempt to unionize the South in the late 1940's but it failed. It isn't as if the unions didn't try, they did. The Treaty of Detroit emerged independently at the same time.
But understanding that/if those are the reasons affects how you choose to target voters (or decide who isn't worth the time or effort to target). By all means play the game - learn the "vibes" that can appeal to people who struggle with argument and evidence, flatter them if you must, but pretending people are other than they are is no place to start.
Life is still determined by reality, so this is urgent. Otherwise we continue with lies until reality hits and then it's all "why didn't anyone tell us", and all those making that attempt are hoarse and exhausted. And furious.
But, I'd disagree with the "it's all optics". Optics is, of course, important. But, my experience on the door step is that a lot of voters are interested in whether there's substance behind the optics, there's an interest in not just the show but looking behind the curtain. But, possibly an interest that's mainly expressed when a voter has someone on their doorstep to answer questions one on one, when looking behind the curtain to see if there's substance to the headline claims and promises takes work to go out and do some research it's possible that for the majority of people it's too much work. It's also true that the subset of people who talk to political activists on the door step is a self-selecting sample with at least 2/3 of people who open the door simply saying they're not interested or too busy and closing the door again very quickly.
No idea how we get out of that, especially now. !0 years ago, before Brexit and Trump's first term, there was more energy around. Now, liberals are more exhausted, and the task is more urgent. On the other hand, supporters of populists are more insistent and enabled. The world hasn't quite stopped yet, and as I say, it will be too late to do anything useful by the time they do. Their faces, and everyone else's, will have been eaten by the leopard they are currently stroking.
I really don't have an answer, but pretending equivalence isn't it.
What's not true? The various Fordist compromises that emerge are in the shadow of Taft-Hartley the effect of which was to stop the growth in union density, and exclude the bulk of workers (and notably healthcare is tied to the employer rather than provided by the state).
This is the same tactic as used in Brexit - just more refined.
They ask people what they want, or what their biggest problems were. People say "Things are getting more expensive". So the right says "Oh, yes, inflation. We will stop inflation."
What they don't say is that this also means that wages will not rise. But also, prices will rise, because the rises are driven by needing profits, not inflation. So people will end up poorer. But they have got what they were told they wanted - no more inflation.
They say they want protection of their jobs. So the right say "Tariffs are a way of ensuring locally produced products are not undercut by foreign imports." "Brilliant - we want more and higher tariffs".
What they don't say is that a) it is the recipients who have to pay these tariffs, and b) that these will be imposed on all sorts of things that are not produced in the US. It ends up being imposed on al the stuff from China that people buy all the time. Because it is cheaper - so the costs to people are increased. Oh, and this applies to their empoyers too, who then have to cut jobs.
They lie, they promise whatever people want, and they demonise their opponents. And when they get power, they just do what they always have - shift the money upwards.
That is what has happened here. That is what is happened in Brexit. That is what happened with the Johnson win.
And - critically - it is not that people are stupid. It is not that people don't understand things. It is that thw world is so incredibly complex that people struggle to comprehend what is needed and what the impact of their choices are.
Second, newspaper reports are always simplistic and often misleading, either by accident or design. Whenever I have had full knowledge of some event I have noticed that newspaper reports of that event are a gross simplification. It's (apparently) all that the average newspaper reader of 2024 can comprehend.
Consequently, the great majority of the public has only a very superficial understanding of the world. That quite likely includes me, by the way. Because although I am quite well-read (astonishingly so by the low standards of 2024) I do not claim for an instant to have a full working knowledge of every topic.
Where I differ from populist types is that I don't believe government policy should be based on my ignorant prejudices.
The facts may be what they are, but what they mean and (especially) what we should do about them are matters of opinion rather than fact.
No they’re not. In fact I would say many of them have a very strong sense of morality, of what is good and what is bad. It’s just not the same as yours.
Some of his supporters do. It's twisted as fuck but it exists.
That is the way I am looking at the outcome of this election. We are listing to the right, noticeably. It is the will of the people. With the exception of the United Kingdom, it is noticeable elsewhere too. France went to the right. Germany's government is about to collapse. Even the government of Japan is shifting to the right. This is what happens in Democracies.
But the pendulum swings both ways. Maybe we are now at the apex of the swing to the right--I hope so. Usually when the American system is controlled by one party, it takes only a couple of years for the other party to start to right the ship.
I cannot remember who said it, people will vote their pocketbook over anything else. If Trump's immigration policies and tariff proposals creates a super inflation, people will move the other way in droves. The ship of state will eventually move to a more even keel.
The exclusions of Southern labor date from the original NLRA of 1935 by excluding domestic and agricultural workers.
The emergence of the Treaty of Detroit was a case of correlation does not equal casuation and in the case of the Auto industry at that time, outsourcing and plant relocation wasn't an issue or a threat. Taft-Hartly had precious little to do with the Treaty of Detroit.
I'd have to disagree; by putting strict limits on union militancy and with bans on wider action Taft-Hartley limited unions to settling with individual employers or sector by sector at best.
Of course, workers in employers/sectors with high margins were able to get very good settlements for the time, but it was at the cost of something more society wide.
Sure, and I wasn't implying that it was only or even mostly the unions fault that this situation came to be, though the AFL didn't help itself, but nevertheless it was the context for the various settlements.
Which returns me to my original point; this situation isn't returning, because even with tariffs most manufacturers aren't going to generate the surpluses necessary for a Fordism 2.0. That's before getting to complex supply chains and the amounts of raw or even high value intermediate products coming from overseas.
Well, most people are stupid. That's not an insult - that's just a fact. Most people don't understand economics. Most people don't understand climate science. Most people don't understand how their phone's GPS system works. And so on. At some level, talking about world-class science or economics or whatever to normal people involves a plea to expertise, which only works if those normal people are prepared to trust the experts.
People are also prejudiced. Again, this isn't an insult: it's a description of how people tend to think. Almost none of us are pure rational beings: we tend to come with a collection of prejudices that we have acquired, which might be political, or religious, or some other core belief of an affinity group to which we belong. If you look at how people behave when presented with data that contradicts one of these core beliefs they have, you find that the contradictory data often actually strengthens their prejudice. They explain away the data, or distort it, or claim that it's a fake made up by their opponents, and so are strengthened in their particular prejudice. They don't do this if their prejudices aren't engaged.
That is not likely as we would be new members. We got what we got because we joined early.
Well, that wouldn't be the same as re-joining the EU, it would be essentially being a member of the EFTA (the pub bore sceptic option), but nevertheless Norway has indicated resistance to this in the past, because it felt that the UK could destabilise that arrangement specifically because it includes free movement of workers:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/mar/27/efta-countries-wary-of-commons-interest-in-norway-brexit-option
I'd refer again to Barnier's staircase model:
https://mailings.cer.eu/sites/default/files/body-images/barnier_staircase_29.4.24.jpg
So the then opposition in Norway (now the government) said.
Reading between the lines (and in fact that article says it in as many words) Norway was chiefly worried about not being top dog in EFTA anymore.
At present they shout loudest and largely the other members fall in behind their wishes after a bit of horse trading. Totally understandable why they would want that to continue but let’s call it the self interest it is!
Except they aren't top dog, the language of 'largest single country' elides the fact that the most powerful partner in the relationship is the EU. In practice all the other EFTA members are subject to a fair amount of rule taking with less ability to influence than the average EU member - though Norway generally has a very good relationship with Brussels.
Right, but I'm not sure what point you feel this makes or what dishonesty this hides. They aren't obligated to give the UK the opportunity to screw up the EFTA.
But again ‘screw up’ is loaded language - the worry of the Norwegian establishment was that even as an organisation of rule takers they would get an arrangement that works for the UK but not necessarily the other members rather than an arrangement that works for Norway but not necessarily the others (as now).
‘Largest single country’ in EFTA can elide what it likes but it’s still a fact.
Norway is ‘top dog’ in EFTA and consequently EFTA policy/negotiating positions are ‘what Norway wants plus the others’.
Norway isn't the only member to indicate they'd be inclined to veto, even in that article.
As for 'screw up', most politicians overseas have been able to follow events in the UK via the British press.
Some relationships are somewhat less zero sum than others.