"It's Still the Economy, Stupid"--and Don't You Ever Forget It

"It's The Economy, Stupid" was a cliché of the 1992 presidential election.

By contrast the different ways in which "pundits" expressed the thought, questioning of the idea that "It's the Economy, Stupid," usually by playing off of the four word phrase attributed to James Carville (like "It's Not the Economy, Stupid"), became a cliché of the 2024 election. (We saw this in the New York Times, and the Financial Times, and The New Republic, and the Guardian, and Salon, and I am sure many, many other fora.)

That it was not the economy, stupid, was a comforting thought for those who hoped to see the Democratic Party do well. After all, they were incumbents in a situation in which the economy was not doing well, which meant that its being about the economy was to their disadvantage--the more in as the Democratic Party had dispelled a great many illusions about itself since 1992, perhaps usefully explained through reference to that longtime stalwart of the post-war Democratic Party, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.. As he explained it, in America "Big Business" government is the default mode of government--an unsustainable default, in that Big Business government eventually makes a mess of things, eventually producing an overwhelming pressure for reform that acts as a necessary, periodic, corrective. So far as conventional wisdom went it was the Democratic Party's function to be the vehicle of such reform--a function the party bosses never had much enthusiasm for, and which they increasingly kicked to the curb from the 1970s on with the ascent of Charles Peters' "neo-liberals," and indeed the election of a member of that group, Bill Clinton, who made the Democratic Party a party of neoliberalism in the more widely used economic sense of that term, a course from which it has not deviated (not with Gore, not with Obama, not with Hillary Clinton, not with Biden, not with Harris), in spite of the public's consistent, increasing, undeniable hostility to that line and its results (the mess that got bigger and bigger because reform never came), which played its part in costing them election after election (the midterms of 1994 that ushered in Newt Gingrich's Contract with America-armed Republican Revolution, in 2000, in the midterms of 2010, in 2016).

Indeed, the Democratic Party and its supporters were eager to see the election be about anything else, as they showed again and again--for instance, in the Times' Michelle Goldberg gleefully looking forward to the Fifth of November as a Day of Feminist Wrath in which "women's fury," far too long "underestimated," would drive a mighty Blue tide across the land—the Democratic Party and its supporters apparently oblivious to the fact that they were doing what the Republicans had done in 1992, counting on the culture war in hard economic times, to the same result, losing by several million votes, as even many who were genuinely furious over abortion rights voted for Trump, because It's Still the Economy, Stupid--with those who suggested otherwise earning the sobriquet "Stupid" in an even more than usually blatant and inarguable way than is the case for the Order of the Brass Check.