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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14965 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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Everyone wants lower prices. Voters say they want lower prices in exit polls. Political candidates run entire campaigns on lowering prices. Any internet discussion can be derailed in an instant by complaining about how much things cost. In 2024, Donald Trump and Republicans surged to power on a wave of anger and resentment at high prices.

Then he immediately jacked the effective tariff rate from 2% to 10% and caused a global energy crisis by starting another war in the Middle East. Now Texas is run by Democrats.

Why? I think the answer is public choice theory. Despite inflation being the number 1 political issue of the last two US general elections, nobody gets into politics to lower consumer prices. Strong consumer sentiment is not a terminal value of ~any of our politicians. It is good with solely instrumental value in that it allows politicians to spend political capital on the things they actually care about, like open borders, ethnic squabbles, corporate profits, or wars.

There is a Matt Yglesias take that even though Republican economic policy is on paper better than Democrat economic policy, Republican presidents end up with worse economic performance because they always start pointless foreign wars, causing both global supply shocks and a rundown of the treasury to pay for military expenditures. It’s hard to argue with this. I’m sort of left going, “real Republican governance has never been tried.”

nobody gets into politics to lower consumer prices

Remember when it was trendy in Blue circles to decry Walmart for having too low prices? The high cost of low prices. There was a whole fucking cultural thing about it.

I'm not pointing fingers at the specific readers on TheMotte or anything, but after 3 decades of observing American politics, I might be forgiven for concluding that we have the historical attention span of a lemming. Every few years something hits the zeitgeist and it's as if ever happened before.

For a contemporary version, consider this Substack which excerpts the author's paywalled article in New Statesman, the main left-wing political magazine in the UK. The basic these is that the UK has been excessively focussed on low consumer prices (unspoken, except for housing) when we should have been thinking about industrial policy and resilience. But the core beef of the political movement that New Statesman readers are part of is about middle-class living standards.

Both right-populists and left-populists are telling a story where manufacturing is special such that prioritising reshoring manufacturing over middle-class living standards will nevertheless produce higher middle-class living standards.

Old wine, new bottle

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