MAGA Turns Against the Constitution
You may not know this, but the United States is in the grips of another crisis — perhaps its greatest crisis of all. In addition to confronting a recession, a collapsing stock market, unemployment rates at a 50-year high and skyrocketing crime, the Constitution itself is now essentially dead. It’s broken. It failed, and unless there is revolutionary change, the nation we love is lost forever.
Welcome to Joe Biden’s America.
Sharp readers will recognize immediately that nothing I said above is true. The economy is growing, the stock market is at historic highs and the unemployment rate is near a 50-year low. That doesn’t mean the economy is perfect. Inflation and higher interest rates have caused real economic pain, but the American economy is still, as the EconForecaster economist James Smith recently said, the “envy of the world.”
Crime in America is too high, especially compared with the rest of the developed world. But crime rates have dropped after pandemic-era increases, and overall crime rates are substantially lower than they were in the relatively recent past: Violent crimes and property crimes are occurring at less than half the rates they were in the early 1990s.
Yet countless millions of Americans simply don’t know any of these facts. According to a recent Harris Poll, 55 percent of Americans believe the economy is shrinking, 56 percent believe that the United States is in a recession, 49 percent think the S&P 500 stock index is down for the year and 49 percent believe — incredibly enough — that unemployment is at a 50-year high. An overwhelming majority of Americans (77 percent) believe that crime is rising — one of the most pessimistic assessments in a generation.
If you’re a Democratic strategist, the perception gap between opinion and reality is a profound political problem. It’s hard for a presidential incumbent to win re-election when so many Americans are so deeply discontent, and these same strategists are confronting a political party that has every incentive to magnify American problems. Republicans want a stink of failure to surround the Biden administration.
But the problem of public ignorance and fake crises transcends politics. Profound pessimism about the state of the nation is empowering the radical, revolutionary politics that fuels extremists on the right and left. In fact, absent catastrophic alarmism, the MAGA movement would never have come close to power.
