The Economy Strikes Back

Some Euro beaker-swirler must have switched off the Large Hadron Collider. The recent off-off-year elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City demonstrated that our molecules no longer bend toward time’s offing. We’ve banded back to political reality.

Or… OR… perhaps there’s a less fantastical explanation for our reversion. Grant your troubadour grace to essay again: On All Hallow’s Eve, a perished soul returns to our mortal plane, inhabiting once again its gravekept body. BEWARE! A macerated humerus geyers from the soil! Creak goes casket hinges! The dead is rendered undead: James Carville once again walks the earth! His rotted cadaver doesn’t yearn for living brains, but to nasally expel, it’s the economy, stupid!

Wait. What’s that? Alive? You’re telling me James Carville isn’t dead yet? Well, then, what is that putrescent corpse doing yammering on CNN?

Whatever outré theory you subscribe to, or anamnetic heuristic you deploy, or chicken entrails you’re reading to grasp the results of the latterly tri-lections, all portents point to the resurrection of that most odious and utilitarian of beings: homo economicus.

Step aside wokeness! Kick off native protectionism! Politics has regressed to the simplest of all questions: Why is my grocery bill so damn high?

Exit polling on election Tuesday bore out the refrain: CNN registered the cost of living as a top concern. Ditto NBC. Same ABC. Echoed too by the Associated Press. The collective concern rings out across our amber waves of grain: Americans are down on the dismal science.

Back in high heat of summer, conservative drip-columnist David Brooks wrote that the signal civic debate of this century is “who can best strengthen the social order.” He dismissed Democrats as absent from the field. Republicans, Brook reasoned, had the upper hand because, as temperamental conservatives, they “instinctively understand that policy is downstream from culture.” Ergo, the heartland party stirs the Kulturkampf pot to rouse anxiety as a GOTV tactic. Our urbane party, as heirs, if not devotees, to Pelagian materialism, consistently bang about fleecing the well-walleted, stuffing the ill-swiped gains into the pockets of the poor, while tucking a mite pelf away for themselves.

Brooks, in his fauxfalutin hectorish tenor, concluded that the right’s holistic vision would triumph over base fiscalism. But as the New York Times’s conservative gelding he also seems to have forgotten his epistemological role: forever in error.

The whole Western-realignment discourse of nativist populares versus neoliberal optimates? Cashiered over climbing Amazon.com receipts. This year’s balloting put paid to the idea that Americans are beyond cheap commodification, with open eyelines raised to transcendent notions of selfless patriotism, noblesse oblige, societal viscosity, the bound kinship of all living things. We’ve reverted to our primordial form, the sarcopterygian scrimper, best represented by the rounded tattooed mass known as the Black Friday Walmart mom who vigorously rips another desperate customer’s hair out to save a Benjamin on an 85-inch Panasonic.

During his comeback campaign, Donald Trump promised a full Ford assault on inflation. He refashioned MAGA as WIN 2.0, but without the sacrificial pleas. (Understandably, as the last time Trump asked us to relinquish our acquisitive freedom, we were assured our couch sabbatticals would last a fortnight. Six months later, beachcombers were cuffed for not triple-masking.)

How did the President tame the rearing Hydra of high prices? By slapping tariffs on imports willy-nilly, squeezing the cost crunch tighter. Oh, you voted for a Dutch-door Whirlpool fridge that retails for under a grand? Well, too dang bad. Best Donny can do is spike the price of Folgers, nix the de minimums loophole, deport your cleaning lady, and tack two decades onto your 30-year mortgage. Trade wars are good, and easy to win, as long as your patience is long and wallet is depthless.

Trump’s insouciance towards cent matters was more punitive than the 2025 LEGO Death Star on my wife’s pocketbook. Two vanilla Democrats easily won dos governorships in what could have been competitive races. The nepo-campus commie Zohran Mamdani captured Gracie Mansion. The candidates all successfully deployed variations of the “affordability” theme. Invisible, visible, clenched, or crushing—voters are agnostic to how the hand provides, as long as the register ringup doesn’t induce cardiac arrest.

Even Republican-chummy media are heeding voters’ cry. Murdoch Inc. outlets like Fox News and the New York Post sound like a skipping record, recapitulating the vibe that shoppers are being taken for a ride.

Is the President, whose golden hearing range won him the demos, listening? Or is a pinch of gilded fluff clogging his cochlea? We’ll go to the post-plebiscite reaction from the chief executive himself: “Prices are down under the Trump administration, and they’re down substantially.”

In other words, don’t believe your lying eyes, you penny-pinching ninnies! Swap Trump today for Joe Biden circa 2023 and the message is downright duplicative.

We might be stuck in a time loop after all.