The MAGA Threat to American Greatness
I can’t find the hellhole Trump describes in his campaign rhetoric.
AFTER I VOTED YESTERDAY, I made it a point to thank every poll worker and citizen volunteering at our polling place. They must have heard the stories of harassment, abuse, and threats that have skyrocketed since the Republican party got into the Big Lie business in 2020. Here’s what Maricopa County, Arizona is having to do this year:
Its tabulation center will have snipers on the roof, metal detectors and security at every entrance, drones surveilling overhead, and security cameras and floodlights to help law enforcement monitor the area. There are also two layers of security fencing, and some workers will be bused in from off-site parking to accommodate the newly implemented measures.
In Colorado, some polling places have installed bulletproof glass and purchased bulletproof vests for election workers. In Gwinnett County, Georgia, public schools will be closed so that resource officers can be redeployed to cover voting. Those are just a sample of the measures being taken nationwide.
The GOP wailed about immigrants supposedly turning America into a Third World nation, but its deliberate, unrelenting lies and threats of violence actually pushed us in that direction.
Still, at my polling place and across the nation, the poll workers show up. They’re not doing it for the money. They’re performing a civic function because they believe it’s important—and they’re so right. God bless them all.
That civic-mindedness in a nihilistic moment is one of the things that is going right with America. There are so many others.
The neo-fascist Trump/Vance ticket relies on a doom message. I suppose they have to. In order to convince non-MAGA voters to put aside their dislike of Trump’s coup attempt, authoritarian intentions, alarming ignorance, and his insane hangers on—to say nothing of his clear mental decline—they have to portray America under Biden and Harris as a hellscape.
“They’ve destroyed the economy,” Trump claims. “I’ve never seen a worse period of time.”
Look around you, my friends. We live in the wealthiest country in the world—in the history of the world, for that matter. The reason so many people from supposedly thriving places like China are making the trek across the globe to attempt to cross our southern border and request asylum is because, for all our faults, this country remains a beacon of freedom and a remarkable engine of prosperity.
The Economist lays out some of the details. Think we’ve been losing ground since the glory days of the 1990s? On the contrary, “America has grown faster than other big rich countries, and it has rebounded more strongly from bumps along the way.” In 1990, the United States accounted for two-fifths of the overall GDP of the G7 nations. Today, it’s about half.
American productivity leaves others in the dust. The Economist adds a few more data points here: “On a per person basis, American economic output is now about 40 percent higher than in western Europe and Canada, and 60 percent higher than in Japan—roughly twice as large as the gaps between them in 1990.” And here’s a statistic that may make you rub your eyes: “Average wages in America’s poorest state, Mississippi, are higher than the averages in Britain, Canada, and Germany.” Our economy has bounced back from the pandemic more strongly than peer nations. “Among the G20 group . . . America is the only one whose output and employment are above pre-pandemic expectations according to the International Monetary Fund.” The United States has about 4 percent of the world’s population but accounts for more than 25 percent of global output. A few years ago, China’s rise was on everyone’s lips (especially Xi Jinping’s) and the Middle Kingdom was expected to supplant the United States as the world’s largest economy. Instead, in the past three years, China’s GDP has slipped from about three-quarters of America’s to two-thirds today.
Nor is it the case—sorry, Bernie Sanders—that all gains have gone to the top 1 percent. Earners in the bottom quintile of households saw their after-tax and after-transfer income rise by 25 percent between 2007 and 2019 (some of that attributable to the Affordable Care Act). Sure, the super rich are super rich (and some are dangerously rich at that). But if you exclude the top 1 percent from the calculations, the Economist reckons that the bottom 20 percent of earners made faster gains in the past couple of decades than the top 20 percent. The middle class saw median real income increase by 57 percent between 1990 and 2019.
How did we achieve this?
America’s dynamic private sector draws in immigrants, ideas and investment, begetting more dynamism. It is home not just to the world’s biggest rocket-launch industry, but also its internet giants and best artificial-intelligence startups. Its seven big tech firms are together worth more than the stock markets of Britain, Canada, Germany and Japan combined; Amazon alone spends more on research and development than all of British business. Because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, meanwhile, investors have a keen appetite for American debt. They flock to Treasuries in times of crisis, letting the government dole out vast stimulus packages.
And yet, some 59 percent of Americans polled in August thought the country was in a recession. We weren’t and we’re not. We’ve achieved the Goldilocks economy—bringing inflation down without precipitating a recession.
Inflation (caused by COVID, COVID relief, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) hurt U.S. consumers and voters may yet punish Kamala Harris for it. There’s some irony here because Trump’s proposed tariffs would boost inflation right back up. Sadly, or perhaps tragically, many voters don’t understand that tariffs are taxes.
Aside from inflation (and recognizing that it’s a central concern to many), the U.S. economy is doing remarkably well. Unemployment fell to its lowest rate in 55 years. Growth is strong. Our universities remain magnets for worldwide talent. The United States leads the world in research and development, and thanks to fracking (an American innovation) is the largest producer of oil and gas on the globe. (Fracking has also been a net gain on fighting climate change since the gas it produces is less polluting than the coal it replaces.)
While far from perfect, the Biden administration did not attempt to interfere with the interest rate hikes the Federal Reserve found necessary. There can be no such confidence about a second Trump term. When he was in the Oval Office, Trump relentlessly pressured the Fed to reduce rates purely for his political benefit. Respecting the independence of the Fed is just like other norms we once took for granted, like not interfering in Justice Department prosecution decisions or refraining from using the IRS or the military against domestic opponents—more a matter of character and public expectation than a matter of law.
Trump says the country needs a strong leader—a dictator, even— to fix the current mess. But, again, this is no hellscape. Crime rates are declining. Our air and water are clean. Our supermarket shelves are groaning with foods I had never even heard of when I was a child.
Politicians are keen not to be seen as representatives of the status quo. The conventional wisdom is that it’s poison and that’s probably right. But what if the status quo is actually something for which we should say a daily prayer of gratitude and the real danger is that we’ll screw it up because we’ve been misled into thinking things are terrible?
That’s where we are. The country has its share of troubles—unsustainable national debt, excessive gun violence, schools that fail to teach civics, fracturing families, the costs and availability of housing and education, and corruption of our information media—but none of those true problems is being addressed by Trump. Instead, he and his minions fill people’s heads with fantasies about rampaging criminal immigrants, a failing economy, spiking crime, and some amalgam of “communism” and “fascism.”
The truth is that America is already great and the most pernicious threat to that greatness is Trump himself.