OThe reasons for Donald Trump’s success will be discussed for a long time. How could a majority of Americans vote for the return to the White House of a man who, four years earlier, showed his total contempt for the very foundations of democracy?
« It’s the economy stupid ! » : the answer, regularly repeated since Bill Clinton’s victorious campaign against George HW Bush [en 1992]seems confirmed by the multitude of polls and opinion surveys published for months. We still need to understand how the rise in the price of eggs could have pushed many Americans to elect for the presidency a man who could transform the United States into a real plutocracy tomorrow?
Because, if you look closely, the American economy is far from doing badly. The generosity of the federal budget allowed activity to resume strongly after the pandemic. Inflation, which had also jumped, is about to be brought under control. To achieve this, the Federal Reserve did not need to cause a recession: for two years, growth has remained solid and unemployment close to its lowest.
Desperately low income
But the price level has not fallen, that of food products in particular. The same goes for house prices, which were pushed up by low interest rates at the end of the last decade. As for rents, they have exploded under the effect of changes in lifestyles linked to the pandemic, the influx of migrants and insufficiencies in supply. It is clear: under the presidency of Joe Biden, the conditions of daily life have become tougher for many Americans.
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That factories have been built in the sectors of the future at rates never before seen, that wages for the lowest paid jobs have rarely increased so quickly, that the unemployment rate for blacks has never been so close of that of Whites does not change a reality: the incomes of a large part of American households remain desperately low, while the wealth of a small minority, driven by the continuous rise in stock prices, has never been as high. After several decades of capitalism largely left to its own devices, the promised trickle-down is more of a drop by drop and the prosperity of the economy is increasingly poorly shared.
This widening of inequalities has contributed to a profound erosion of social cohesion, an erosion further aggravated by the quality, also still very unequal, of education and health care to which Americans have access. This quality reflects the price, also very unequal, that American democracy places on the lives of its citizens.
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