A reason why I talk about the stock market and economics a lot is because those are the two issues that policy makers are also most concerned with. We are living in a world increasingly dominated by economics and capital, as opposed to culture, even if the latter gets the most media coverage, and culture war battles seem so heated online. The stock market, employment, GDP, and national stability are the barometers for measuring the health of the country and are of upmost importance. Cultural factors such as gay marriage, abortion, immigration, etc. have long since been pushed to the periphery. Such issues may be important to individual voters, but to the Republican ‘establishment’ in terms of policy, not as much. This tendency of conservative politicians pandering to voters on cultural issues and then abandoning such issues once in power, in covered Thomas Frank’s 2004 best-seller What’s The Matter With Kansas.
Stopping potential terrorism, assimilating immigrants, keeping black and Hispanic employment up, and the stock market up are the main priorities of the mainstream-right, it would seem. Maybe that is an oversimplification, but Trump tweets a ton about the economy, the market, black unemployment, and American military dominance and might, and foreign policy, but little about immigration and other issues. This does not bode well in terms of those who are tired of tech censorship, tired of being called antisemitic for opposing funding for Israel, or tired of being made to feel ashamed for being white, or tired of too much immigration (legal or not), or tired of moral decay. The GOP , Trump included, shows little willingness to deal with this stuff.
It’s not just conservatives, but this veneration and prioritization of economics, specifically the stock market and GDP, over other issues applies to policy makers in general, including the left. In September 2008, during the depths of the financial crisis, the House passed a massive, emergency bank bailout package in a matter of days, as major bipartisan effort, yet the fact that half a million illegals enter the country every year, seems to be hardly a cause for alarm, for either side of the aisle. The US economy is huge and can sustain large number people who are possibly a drain on public resources, but considering that half the country has a negative effective tax rate, how much longer can this be sustained? Obviously both sides benefit from such demographic change due immigration: the for ‘right’, it’s cheap labor; for the left, cheap votes. Rising entitlement spending due to immigration is an economic issue, yet one neither side wants to address.
The Fed and Washington are working closer than ever, combined with major foreign governments, to do everything in their power to keep the stock market as high as possible and the economic expansion sustained for as long as possible. This is a global effort involving trillion of dollars of various asset purchasing programs designed to keep rates low and equities more attractive. But it’s not just central bank intervention keeping the stock market and economy strong, but massive consumer spending both domestically and global, such as the Chinese and the global wealthy. Multinationals such as Walmart, Microsoft, Disney, Nike, and Apple keep reporting stronger sales and fatter profits than ever, quarter after quarter.
The dems at least care about pushing their social justice agendas as much, if not more, as they care about GDP , which at least to some degree explains their legislative and judicial successes over the past century. Thus we cannot look to conservatives to do anything to stop the left. There is little reason for optimism the next 1 or 5 years will be a departure from the last three years. There is not going to be any substantive progress on the wall, opioid addiction, immigration, tech censorship, trans indoctrination and normalization, etc. Just the same mediocre China trade deal every 4 weeks that barely does anything yet trumpeted on twitter as huge progress. If Trump wins, The market will go up, so that is why I recommend staying invested, but we have to position ourselves for another four years of losses on the culture wars.
This leads us to the ‘great freeze’ that will grip American politics from 2020-2025 should Trump be reelected. It will be like the last three years, but even more frozen. No legislation, no reform, no action that undoes anything the left has done. The private sector, especially large cap tech, will boom, as well as the overall US economy, hence my enthusiasm for stocks, but the left will ramp up their censorship efforts online and in corporate America, and there will be more immigration and worker visas, more left-wing cultural indoctrination: a continuation of the deleterious policies that got us here.
We’re also going to see the continued decline of the dissident-right as an online and political force, due to a combination of low morale and declining relevance, among other factors. There was all this enthusiasm in 2016-2018 in anticipation of the change that Trump would engender, that largely has not materialized. Leading into the election and if Trump is reelected, there will be a bump in enthusiasm, that will quickly evaporate when it becomes apparent that in spite of impeachment and the FBI no longer being a threat, that an unyielding inertia has set it dooming the administration to inaction. The Senate impeachment trial is a farce, as we all know, but when it’s over, it’s not like we’re going to see Trump return to fighting form as during 2016 campaign or that the dems will face consequences for their actions, but more the same dithering we have come to expect. So that means, at best, Trump can only stop the rate of change, but not the direction. But the good news is, America is big enough and has enough people that one does need national representation to have their values reciprocated by smaller communities and groups. It may sound cliched to say, but you cannot look to politicians for the answers. Learn a skill. There are still millions of Americans who value traditionalism, and are at the very least aware of these problems.