When Will The Riots Begin?
16th April 2020
Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist, is not afraid to go there.
I was surprised when Trump won. The economy was doing well, Trump had charisma but was erratic and made what seemed like many missteps (like disparaging people in the military) that it didn’t seem plausible he could win. Yet, he plowed through the Republican primaries and gathered a base of support that even people who have reason to hate his guts like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham even they kowtowed. I don’t want to revisit the debates about why Trump won but one of the reasons was that his base felt disrespected by coastal and media elites–their religion, their guns, their political incorrectness, their patriotism, their education, their jobs–all disrespected.
And now maybe it is happening again. From the point of view of the non-elites, the elites with their models and data and projections have shut the economy down. The news is full of pleas for New York, which always seemed like a suspicious den of urban inequity, but their hometown is doing fine. The church is closed, the bar is closed, the local plant is closed. Money is tight. Meanwhile the elites are laughing about binging Tiger King on Netflix. It doesn’t feel right. I can understand that or feel that I must try to understand that.