Americans Aren’t Sure What They Want or How To Get It

There is something odd going on in America, an outbreak of cognitive dissonance. Even our innovative pharmaceutical industry cannot come up with a vaccine for a disease that allows Americans to have inconsistent beliefs, to do the opposite of what their beliefs dictate.

·       Only 25 per cent of Democrats say they want Biden to seek a second term. Some 60 per cent of Americans do not want Trump to be President again. The 2024 Presidential race is likely to be between Biden and Trump.

·       Hundreds of teenagers stampede through the swankiest shopping street in Chicago, torching cars, smashing windows and looting. The Democrats have selected Chicago for their 2024 presidential convention, “a choice”, says the President, “to showcase out historic progress including building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not from the top down”.

·       Republicans agree they are losing ground in local elections because of their extreme variant of the pro-life, anti-abortion position. The Party’s leading alternative to Trump favors legislation that would prohibit abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, when many women might not know they are pregnant.

·       Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, expects a recession with “repercussions for years to come.” He is spending $3 billion on a new 60-storey Park Avenue headquarters building, all-electric from hydro sources, replete with yoga and meditation rooms.

·       Some 71 per cent of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track. More than 90 per cent of incumbents generally win re-election to the House, most winning more than 60 per cent of the vote. In 2022 no senators and only one of the 31 incumbent governors eligible to run for re-election were defeated. The Washington Post’s Michael Barone summed it up, “It’s hard to see how the voters could have done a better job of cementing in place the policy status quo.”

·       Only 12 per cent of Americans believe electric vehicles would do “a great deal” to address climate change, 41 per cent say they would never buy one and 55 per cent are opposed to phasing out new gasoline-powered cars and trucks by 2035. President Biden has taken steps to require that 67 per cent of new passenger cars are all-electric by 2032, at which time then-90-year-old Biden would be in the market for a new vehicle only if he had surrenders his beloved, high-power, 65-year-old petrol-guzzling Corvette.

There are several possible explanations for this huge gap between what the voters want and what the people they elect will give them, what voters say they believe about the state of the country and what they do about it, and between important economic actors’ predictions and how they react to their own predictions.

Perhaps voters prefer the devils they know to those lurking in the wings. Perhaps citizens have lost faith in the two-party system, which is why half of them no longer enroll in either party, hoping for a third-party or independent candidate.

But hope is not a policy. The voting system is rigged against third parties and independents. In the past and current centuries only Progressive Teddy Roosevelt (27 per cent), Dixicrat segregationist George Wallace (14 per cent), and Independent Ross Perot (19 per cent) have managed to obtain double-digit percentages of the votes.

Perhaps voters see themselves as latter-day Walt Whitmans, the poet who wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” Given the condition of the products of the nation’s educational system that is probably the least likely explanation for their ability to live comfortably with their cases of cognitive dissonance.

Don’t look for answers on social media. Pew Research found that most postings are by groups at either end of the political spectrum. Some 55 per cent of “Faith and Flag Conservatives” and 44 per cent of “Progressive Liberals” follow what is going on in government most of the time, while only 19 per cent of “Stressed Sideliners”, rather like the silent majority identified by Richard Nixon in  1969. Moderates in both the Democratic and Republican parties post far less frequently on social media than those on the extremes of the political spectrum, but it is the extremists posting that are reported by cable news.

My guess is that Americans are busy. Over 60 per cent have jobs, and some more than one. Many more have household responsibilities, caring for the very young and the very old being among the leaders, that are as demanding as jobs. The average person spends 1,692 hours per year watching television – that is the equivalent of a full work week. About 30 million play golf, which consumes about 300 hours per year of their time. Most pile onto planes or into cars to visit distant families in this rather large country.

Others vote with their feet. High-tax, Democratic states of New York, Illinois, and California lost population between July 2021 and July 2022. They are gambling on “progressive” national Democratic administrations to bail out their pension funds and prevent competition for their clapped educational systems to enable then to take matters from bad to worse. Their citizens fled to Florida, Texas and a swathe of southern and mid-Western states with lower taxes and fewer regulations, many appalling their new hosts by bringing with them the liberal politics they just fled. Please don’t californicate in our state is heard in states that are doing well by avoiding the progressive notions of fiscal propriety and the production of regulations.

Meanwhile, Americans continue to vote for the drivers of the train they believe to be roaring down the wrong track, expecting different results. Albert Einstein would call that insanity.