Washington Monthly - Can Affordability Save Democracy?
In 2024, anger over rising prices helped return Donald Trump to the White House. Two years later, Trump’s war with Iran has sent fuel costs soaring, threatening his party’s control of Congress. A president who benefited from the public’s frustration with inflation has inflicted another price shock on voters.
For economist Isabella Weber, the political consequences should come as no surprise. In Anti-Fascist Economics, she argues that governments that fail to prioritize the economic needs of ordinary people invite a backlash against democracy itself. From Weimar Germany to the COVID-19 pandemic, she traces how rising prices for essentials can erode faith in democratic institutions and create openings for the far right. Her prescription is not simply for governments to spend more, but to make affordability their organizing principle.
That argument could sound like a familiar progressive indictment of neoliberalism, the governing philosophy that treats market outcomes as largely beyond the reach of democratic politics. Weber does not equate neoliberalism with fascism: early champions of market liberalism, including Friedrich Hayek, saw it as a defense against authoritarianism. But by placing so many economic decisions beyond democratic intervention, she argues, this orthodoxy has “normalized the acceptance of mass suffering.” A government that tells voters it is powerless to relieve hardship should not be surprised when they turn against it. Weber’s most provocative target, however, isn’t a free-market conservative. It’s Joe Biden.
Biden declared his economic agenda to be a break with the orthodoxies of the previous four decades. His administration invested in domestic manufacturing, strengthened antitrust enforcement, and used industrial policy to accelerate the transition to clean energy. By many measures, Bidenomics represented exactly the kind of muscular government Weber favors. The Inflation Reduction Act, in particular, rejected the notion that government should leave major economic transitions to the private sector. Yet the voters who endured the inflation of his presidency elected Trump anyway. Why?
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