They began, of course, with one of the most chaotic and intense years in recent American history. After a global pandemic brought almost all aspects of life to a halt, cities erupted in nationwide riots for much of the summer, and a seemingly endless stream of scandals and stunts like the Hunter Biden laptop drove the politically-active public to exhaustion; after all that, Joe Biden won the presidency.
Biden—the old-fashioned, centrist, familiar vice president from the Obama years—was supposed to represent a repudiation of the chaos of the Trump years, and of 2020 especially. The “adults were back in charge,” and politics could finally get boring again. Or so many thought.
Instead, the Biden years saw the government’s heavy-handed pandemic response drag on, the outbreak of war in Ukraine and, later, Gaza, and the consequences of the bipartisan economic response to the covid pandemic slam into the already-exhausted country in the form of a forty-year-high rate of price inflation.
The high prices especially drove many voters to abandon the Democrats in the 2022 midterms—although the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade earlier that year drove high Democratic turnout, which greatly minimized the expected “Red Wave.” Still, in 2024, voters seemed to snap all the way back in the other direction and handed Trump and the Republican Party the White House and both houses of Congress. And now, only two years later, Trump’s approval rating is at a historic low, and not only Democrats but even “democratic socialists” are enjoying all the political momentum, as we saw in Tuesday’s elections.
It can be tempting to chalk these dramatic political swings up to any one of the many stories that dominate the news cycle at the moment. Or, on the other side, to some seemingly inexplicable global forces of chaos that seem to be driving all aspects of public life these last few years.
But, in truth, there’s a very clear explanation for the political whiplash we’ve been experiencing in these last few elections: inflation.
Now, too often, any discussion of inflation becomes hyper-focused on one unusually high driver of last month’s CPI report or a slightly better-than-expected month-over-month reading in the core PCE.
But that is not how most people have experienced and are experiencing inflation.
To better understand how inflation has changed our politics, we have to zoom out.
As we cover here a lot, inflation has been a ubiquitous and escalating problem in this country for a long time. Prices naturally fall as economies grow. It’s only because the political class was able to take control of the monetary and banking system over the last fifty to a hundred years that the sort of permanent price inflation we’re supposed to consider normal is even possible.
In other words, inflation isn’t a new problem. But, back in 2019, it was mostly a background issue. Prices were rising, but slowly. And the entire field of “respectable,” establishment-friendly economists were telling everyone that the 2 percent inflation rate was optimal. Those obsessed with politics were focused on non-economic stories like the Trump impeachment, while the politically-disinterested majority were focused on their own lives.
But then covid started to spread, and state and local governments across the US began locking down the country with the full support of the federal government. And a primary aspect of that federal support came from the Federal Reserve.
