DID AMERICA’S WOMEN COUNT IN THE US ELECTION?

By Pauline Lewis

Legal challenges aside, Joe Biden has clinched it for the Democrats and Donald Trump has been defeated.

The feud between the two contenders was highly publicised and often highly contentious, dominating the discourse between a highly divided American electorate. It was, therefore, easy to overlook the important historic milestone that this election has ushered in; Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s running mate, has become the first woman in US history to become Vice-President. 

This is no mean feat. Hilary Clinton is probably the highest-ranking US female politician to date, having served as both First Lady to Bill Clinton, and then as US Secretary of State under the Obama administration. Previously, only Geraldine Ferraro had managed to reach these heights after becoming the running mate to Walter Mondale for the Democrats during the 1984 election. When she is sworn in at the January inauguration, Kamala will have surpassed both. 

The first female US Vice-President is milestone enough to write about, but the beautiful reality that accompanies this milestone is that Kamala Harris is a woman of colour whose cultural background reads like a cultural diversity dream.  Kamala’s late mother was from Tamil Nadu, a southern state in India, whilst her father is from Jamaica.  She has kept ties with her family in India since childhood and experienced racism as child growing up in the US, with children being told not to play with her simply because she was ‘black’. This cultural background brings many ‘firsts’ with it, as it gives her the simultaneous status of being the first African-American, first Asian-American, and first Caribbean-American to hold the position of Vice-President. Celebrations have already begun taking place in her maternal grandfather’s village of Thulasendrapuram in India.  

But there have been other significant gains for women in this election too. Candidates for Congress appear on the same ballot as the Presidential nominees, and this election has seen the record number of 318 women running for a seat in Congress, exceeding almost 50% of all the combined nominees. In addition to this, 117 of these women also happen to be women of colour. Regardless of the final result, this record number of women standing should be seen as a success in itself.   

This increase in numbers has improved the overall percentage of seats held by women in the US, which went up from 23.7% in the last election to 25.2% in 2020. Not all who stood won, but the increase has again led to several firsts.

Cynthia Lummis will be the first ever woman that the US state of Wyoming has sent to the Senate, whilst Cori Bush becomes the first Black member of Congress from Missouri.

Similarly, as Marilyn Strickland becomes the first Black woman to be sent to Congress by Washington state, New Mexico has become the first US state in history to simultaneously send three women of colour to represent the state in Congress. 

There is no question that there is a lot to celebrate here, but we should never forget the road that has been navigated to get to this point; a road where once there were no women in politics at all, where women were not entitled to vote, and where Black people had no vote at all. As Marilyn Strickland says, “It is exciting to see so many women of colour step up. I think the more that we see folks running for office, the more that we see people holding office, the more encouraged people are.”  The 2020 US Election should be testament to this.

Pauline Lewis

Pauline Lewis

THE US ELECTION – WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD?

By Bethan Laughlin

It is safe to say that 2020 has been quite a year for the United States.

Joe Biden has been announced as the projected winner of the 2020 US Presidential election. The final votes continue to be counted, but with the highest voter turnout in 120 years and the incumbent President Trump claiming the race to be fraudulent, without substantive evidence of any kind, this election is showing itself to be one of the most significant in living memory.

This election has shown the highest voter turnout since the election of 1900, with an estimated 160 million people voting and a turnout rate of 66.9%, up from the 56% in 2016. This high turnout has resulted in Biden receiving the highest numbers of votes in US history, with over 76 million votes and counting. An incumbent President losing re-election has only happened ten times since the creation of the Office of the Presidency in 1789. This fact, along with the scale of turn out, Biden swinging Pennsylvania back to blue, and the first female Vice President who is also from a minority background, makes it clear that both this election and the ticket that won it is a truly historic moment.  

Naturally, much of the coverage of the election has been focused on Biden’s steady gains towards victory through a commitment to a hopeful future, one that aims to undo the harm created by Trump. Vitally however, it is imperative to remember that President Trump received the second highest number of votes in history, currently standing at over 71 million. This is 8 million more than voted for him in the 2016 election. All of this amid a pandemic that continues to ravage the USA with over 10 million cases recorded so far.

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The last four years have been home to a Presidency filled with legal cases, Twitter storms, conspiracy theories, extreme partisanship, allegations of Russian interference, over 200,000 Covid-19 deaths and a racial reckoning following the death of George Floyd that swept the nation. Tumultuous to say the least.

From a UK perspective, it was thought sensible to assume that Biden, with his message of reconciliation, hope and a ‘united’ less divisive United States would lead to an obvious victory. The scale of voter turnout in support of President Trump paints a different picture to this idea and what was projected in the Polls.  

Throughout his campaign Biden has strived to be seen as a moderate counterweight to the extremism in language, tone and policy that has defined Trumps term. Consequently, he became the anti-Trump vote. Was this unexpected? No, and fundamentally it was successful. However, the importance of the scale of the Trump turnout should not be minimised. With over 71 million people turning out to not only support the continued Presidency of Trump, but a Republican party that has seen a gradual but vivid shift towards policies that align with Trump’s vision for America, those labelled as ‘fringe’ voters for supporting Trump in 2016 have shown themselves to be anything but.

Moving forward, the grievances and political beliefs of Trump voters should not be overlooked by a victorious Democratic Party in the coming years. Any future success from a Democratic candidate rests on those Americans who identify as Republicans feeling that their lives, hopes, fears and grievances are being respected by the President across policy formulation and debate.

The reality remains that for tens of millions of Americans, the arguable chaos of the last four years was not enough to vote for Biden. This makes one thing perfectly clear, ‘Trumpism’ and the politics it champions is by no means defeated or going anywhere fast. In fact, it shows the immense task at hand for Biden in trying to bind and unify a country that has seen itself fracture over political divides more than ever in the last four years. It almost goes without saying that this will be a difficult task. It is highly likely that the Senate will be majority Republican - although the votes are still being counted - and with a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, President Elect Biden will have a fight on his hands in his quest for reconciliation.

Bethan Laughlin

Bethan Laughlin

DOES LIBERALISM REST ON AN OVER-OPTIMISTIC VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE?

By Dr Kristian Niemietz (IEA)

In the early stages of the lockdown, James Kirkup of the Social Market Foundation wrote an article posing the question: “Will the pandemic kill off libertarianism?”. The need for a lockdown, he argued, refuted – or at least seriously undermined – the libertarian view of human nature as benign and reasonable:

“[L]ibertarianism […] suggests that when people are left to their own devices, they will, in the end, do sensible, collaborative and even kind things. […] Free marketeers …rest their argument for unfettered market interactions on the idea that these are dealings between rational actors.”

If this were the case, the argument goes, a lockdown would never have been necessary. We would have just naturally and spontaneously done the right thing. Voluntary social distancing would have done the job. Alas, we were not being reasonable. We just carried on as normal, which is why the government had to U-turn, and substitute draconian restrictions for voluntary guidelines. The reason, according to Kirkup, is that:

“we make our allocative choices not on the basis of neat, orderly mental spreadsheets weighing cost and benefit, but because of messy, complicated human frailty.”

Kirkup seems to see the UK as a disorderly classroom, supervised by a naïve teacher who initially believes that children are basically reasonable and kind, and then learns the hard way that this is not the case. In his interpretation, libertarianism relies on an over-optimistic view of human nature, which is why it doesn’t work in the real world.

I don’t accept Kirkup’s critique, because I don’t recognise what he describes as “the libertarian view of human nature”. It’s certainly not my own view. I’m a grumpy pessimist, who finds positivity and cheerfulness annoying. For me, the case for limited government does not rest on the assumption that we are all perfectly rational and benign. It rests on the assumption that whatever “messy, complicated human frailties” we may have as individuals are amplified, not neutralised, by politics and political decisionmaking.

Of course we often make rash, impulsive, ill-judged and ill-informed decisions. But these tendencies do not go away if we make decisions collectively – they get worse.

I have met plenty of people who are, on an individual level, perfectly sensible and perfectly capable of running their own lives, but who also gladly embrace the most irrational and destructive political ideas. We are so much more irrational when we argue about politics than we are when we make individual decisions concerning our own lives.

Take one of my favourite bugbears: socialism. Socialism has been tried multiple times, and it has ended in catastrophic failure every single time. There really shouldn’t be an argument here. This matter should be settled. Yet it is anything but. Socialism doesn’t just remain popular – it remains especially popular with highly educated, knowledgeable and intelligent people.

The right-wing press likes to mock the fact that socialists are often fairly affluent and lead lifestyles that are awkwardly similar to those of the despised bourgeoisie. They call them “champagne socialists” and “Moet Marxists”. But I have a somewhat different interpretation of the “rich socialist” phenomenon: for me, it shows that in their personal sphere, socialists can be as entrepreneurial as anyone. They are perfectly capable of prospering and thriving in a market economy. But they would nonetheless happily abolish it, and all the freedom and prosperity that comes with it. They are individually rational, but politically irrational.

There are lots of similar, if less extreme, examples. Plenty of people happily buy goods and services from all over the globe, but then vote for protectionist policies. Plenty of people have productive business relations and/or friendly personal relations with immigrants, but then vote for anti-immigration policies. Plenty of people are thrifty and forward-looking with their own personal finances, but when it comes to the public finances, they have the political preferences of a drunken sailor. Plenty of people complain about how terrible it is that their children cannot afford to move out, but then vote for NIMBY policies and oppose every housing development.

Or take the way technology has affected different areas of life. In almost every respect, the internet, and more recently, our ability to access it on the go, has been a huge blessing. It has led to countless innovations and productivity improvements, it has reduced transaction costs, and it has made a lot of things easier and more convenient. Yet in one area, it has been poisonous: politics. It has led to the formation of echo chambers and filter bubbles, in which people seek endless confirmation for what they already believe, but never come across a dissenting viewpoint, unless it’s in the form of an online pile-on, or a shouting match between enemy tribes.

Are we as bad at risk assessment as Kirkup claims? Possibly – but we are infinitely worse at it when we act collectively. We ban perfectly safe genetically modified food, even though it would be good for our health, our wallet, and the environment, because of a combination of atavistic fears, agrarian romanticism, and social conformism. We support movements like the Greta cult, which would shut down most of the economy, because we mistake a moderate and manageable problem – climate change – for the apocalypse. We obsess over the non-issue of chlorinated chicken, rather than focussing on the benefits of a trade deal with the world’s biggest economy. In our daily lives, we make trade-offs all the time, weighing the risks and benefits of different courses of action. In politics, we refuse to even engage with the logic of trade-offs, because we insist on treating everything as a moral absolute.

I could go on. What does this all tell us about what the relationship between the state and the individual should be, or how the state should act during a pandemic? Not very much, unfortunately. Collective action problems are a thing, and a pandemic is a dramatic example of that. Some things can only be done collectively, and that, unfortunately, involves politics.

And that’s fair enough. I’m not an anarchist, I accept a role for the state, and I don’t have a definitive list of what exactly that role should involve. All I’m saying is: let’s not kid ourselves that a bigger and bossier state is somehow an antidote to our character flaws, or a logical conclusion of a more “realistic” view of human nature. It is quite the opposite: politics brings out the worst in us. If you think the individual can’t be trusted, wait until you meet the public.

Dr Kristian Niemietz (IEA)

Dr Kristian Niemietz (IEA)

 This article was originally published by the Institute of Economic Affairs and can be found on the IEA website