The election US voters won’t get to have

On Tuesday, January 23, the quadruply indicted former president Donald Trump won a New Hampshire primary against Nikki Haley, the last alternative Republican presidential candidate standing after a month of contests that saw Ron DeSantis end his run on Sunday, and Vivek Ramaswamy the week prior. DeSantis immediately endorsed Trump over the “warmed over corporatism” that he felt Haley represents, after both DeSantis and Ramaswamy failed to attract voters with escalating anti-trans rhetoric and related crusades against the perceived “wokeness” of society.

Trump is currently viewed as the presumptive nominee, despite filling the news more frequently with courtroom appearances than campaign trail politics.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden won the New Hampshire Democratic primary as a write-in candidate, at 63.9% to a distant 19.6% for Dean Phillips and 4% for Marianne Williamson. Biden and New Hampshire have longstanding animosity in part due to a struggle to change the initial launch point for Democratic primaries, to better reflect the nation’s diversity. As an incumbent president, Biden is considered the Democratic Party’s presumptive candidate for 2024, and the presidential primaries are being treated more as a formality than a rigorous democratic exercise.

What’s consuming all the election-cycle oxygen instead? A whirlwind of criminal cases, emboldened nationalist rhetoric, the legacy of January 6, 2021, the stolen election myth, US involvement in major international wars, legal attacks on queer people, women, and immigrants, and fears around the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. The weary narrative of a presidential rematch between Trump and Biden is already shaping up to be one of “saving democracy” from authoritarianism.

And there is a stolen election in all of this: the current one.

Because rather than get a chance to discuss the nation’s more pragmatic, kitchen-table politics, and to wrestle with the country’s overarching mandate in a more measured way, US voters have been stripped of the ability to make informed electoral decisions about key domestic and foreign policies when they go to the polls in November. The exercise of US democracy is already an impoverished affair.

Can the 2024 election cycle be salvaged? Probably not. But here are some of the deeper issues US citizens deserve to see discussed all the same.

Kitchen-table economics

On Thursday, January 25, the latest GDP report offered promising figures for the US economy, which has been particularly robust by common metrics in recent years. In the last quarter of 2023, the economy saw 3.3% expansion, with a real GDP of 3.1% for the prior year. This same period also saw significantly lower inflation relative to growth, despite real incomes growing almost twice as fast as expected. Whereas real incomes only grew in 2022 due to improved employment outcomes, middle and lower-class workers especially saw real wages account for income gains in 2023. For 22 months, US unemployment was below 4%: a 50-year record.

This is transpiring in a world suffering its lowest half-decade of GDP growth in thirty years. Last year, global growth fell from 2.6 to 2.4%, with low-income countries enduring the greatest hits to economic development. This year, even advanced economies are expected to see growth slow from 1.5% in 2023 to 1.2% in 2024. And if the world hasn’t fallen into even deeper recession? World Bank analysts attribute that resilience, too, to the strength of the US economy.

But why then have the last two years been gripped by low consumer confidence? Even while spending and travel are up? Many in finance have struggled to explain why, despite all the robust indicators of economic health, so many US citizens don’t feel well-off, or hopeful for their financial futures.

In part, this is because low unemployment figures can tell many stories. Here, wage gains are going mostly to younger workers changing jobs, whereas many older workers are among the discouraged employment seekers, and workers otherwise not seeing wage gains at all. This can easily create a feeling of being left behind.

At the same time, spending is going up, but because the prices for basic consumer goods have, too. Although the Federal Reserve pursued a policy of higher interest rates to discourage spending (and in the process, to try to keep inflation low), this strategy has left many US citizens trapped between keeping up with current inflation-based costs, and managing the rising interest on their accumulating debts.

Even worse, the Fed policy to cap inflation doesn’t address the fact that the main driver of inflation is high corporate profits. Although the US government has worked hard to reduce the cost of trade for companies in recent years, and to detangle many of the distribution network issues exacerbated by pandemic and war, there simply aren’t enough federal checks and balances to compel those companies to pass on their savings to consumers. Average citizens are thus being rapped on their knuckles for spending habits, while the real culprits for inflation get a pass.

But where would federal checks and balances come from? This is a core issue that traditionally divides conservative, centrist-liberal, and leftist thinking. When trickle-down economics fail time and time again to yield better outcomes for average citizens, what is the correct tool for federal intervention? What mix of incentives and disincentives could make the economy run smoother, with the positive impacts of overall growth felt by more often by everyone?

The Chevron deference, and democracy

This economic issue ties into a broader question of federal oversight that’s currently difficult for everyday citizens to access, especially when inundated by extremist politics that divert attention and activist energies into legal struggles for women, LGBTQ+ persons, and immigrants instead.

The right-wing supermajority on the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has already demonstrated a strong willingness to gloss past key procedural questions to achieve partisan results. It did so last year when it overlooked matters of standing in cases like Biden v. Nebraska, where another party claimed the right to speak for a supposedly injured party that was not filing suit, and where the 6-3 ruling against Biden’s student debt relief plan interfered with the ability of Congress to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs”, as per its own HEROES Act of 2003.

READ: Along party lines: SCOTUS decisions and US schisms

This ruling anticipated two major court cases in the current SCOTUS session: Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce. Both come to the bench with overwhelming support from major corporate and conservative players, in the form of dozens of amicus filings, because these cases will in all likelihood see the Chevron deference overturned: a major win for private businesses impacted by federal activities.

In 1984’s Chevron USA, Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the oil giant Chevron won in a case decided by applying a simple test to the then-industry-friendly Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which was implementing lax standards for the Clean Air Act. At the time, even right-wing justices were fine with giving federal agencies the power to interpret ambiguous laws in everyday administrative contexts. Although someone might disagree with an agency’s interpretation, if it was a reasonable interpretation, the courts were to stay out of it.

At the time, this ruling supported the traditional idea that Congress, not the bench, should be deciding how federal policy would be applied. Moreover, the interpretive power that SCOTUS gave to federal agencies back then didn’t run afoul of corporate interests, because agencies were still fairly deferential to the private sector. (The EPA at the time, for instance, was hedging around a Clean Air Act obligation to tackle emissions at their source, and the agency definition defended by SCOTUS’s ruling was one that broadened what a “source” even was.)

But once those federal agencies started to interpret law in ways that did challenge corporate interests, they became a problem for conservative politicians and justices. Today, the conservative argument goes that federal agencies deciding the everyday interpretation of congressional law is undemocratic.

In other words, even though the Chevron deference doesn’t allow for just any legal interpretation to withstand court scrutiny, many conservatives are moved by the idea that eliminating this SCOTUS test will somehow compel Congress to get better at writing unambiguous laws in the first place. This argument sidesteps the fact that contemporary society’s complexity has made legal specialists a necessity, and it risks the ability of federal agencies to respond more promptly and flexibly to any number of socioeconomic crises under their scope of work.

For all these ideological claims to a more democratic government without Chevron, there are also bleaker motives to far-right Republicans trying to gut the EPA, the Fed, the Federal Communications Commission, and other specialist state agencies. Biden v. Nebraska made some of those motives clear, because in that case an express effort by the Secretary of Education, acting under congressional law to create a new program, was foiled by the court’s sudden bafflement with the meaning of basic vocabulary like “waive or modify”. In practice, that case offered SCOTUS a chance to implement an alternative strategy, the “major questions” doctrine (MQD), and to ignore the “reasonableness” component of the Chevron deference entirely.

And there is an important civic question to be answered here, around the real and desired structure of democratic action within today’s US constitutional republic. The difference between the MQD and the Chevron deference is that, while the latter starts with the language of the original law, the MQD starts with the court-perceived economic or political impact of an agency action, and works backward to ask if there is robust constitutional standing for taking it.

The underlying principle of MQD is the presumption that Congress should never give authority over “major questions” to another administrative body. This approach invites justices to determine the impact of a given policy for themselves, before addressing its legality. And yet, this recent shift in judicial strategy didn’t emerge out of the ether; rather, it reflects the country’s overall struggle between traditional proceduralism and a right-wing activism more concerned about outcomes that don’t favor corporate actors or conservative dominance.

Outcomes-based right-wingers are joined in this issue, though, by outcomes-based left-wingers and centrist-liberals: other voting pools, that is, more eager to see a certain result come about than to achieve it in a way that upholds existing law.

Does the US electorate actually care about following procedure, upholding the Constitution, and providing good governance through checks and balances on sitting officials? Or is there so little hope for bipartisan consensus-building that many voters will gladly accept the claim that restricting federal agencies is the only way to improve the quality of direct democratic action, going forward?

Managing a multi-front military budget

There is also the ongoing question of US involvement in international wars, and related deterrence missions. Here, too, a quality of democracy is at stake.

Earlier in January, Biden launched a series of strikes against Houthi operatives in Yemen, without first seeking the authorization of Congress. After months of protests against overt US material support for Israel’s war in Gaza, a federal court on January 26, 2024 will assess Biden’s complicity (along with that of two other state officials) in Defense for Children International–Palestine v. Biden. Although the Biden administration seeks to have the case thrown out, the defense still acknowledges the importance of the suit in a broader sense, writing:

This suit raises quintessential political questions because Plaintiffs seek to have this Court superintend the Executive Branch’s foreign policy and national security judgment and compel the government to prevent Israel from purportedly committing genocide in Gaza.”

“Defendant’s Reply in Support of Motion to Dismiss”, January 26, 2024

What other recourse does an average citizen have to be heard?

This political issue has transformed both the Republican and Democratic Parties over the last hundred years, as different seasons in their respective agendas have called for different balances of foreign priorities. Should the US show up globally in a more prominent deterrence role? Even if this leads to more active warfare and meddling in other sovereign affairs? Or should the country pursue a more insular nationalism, refusing to embroil itself any further in international strife?

Neither side has a monopoly on interests in global engagement and detachment. Nor does either side have a good answer to the fact that full detachment isn’t even possible in the current global economy. As much as many US citizens feel beleaguered by fears of population change under rising immigration, the connection between immigration and climate change remains too abstract for most voters to understand how mitigating climate change elsewhere can stabilize their country, too. They just see, and react to, xenophobic reports about new arrivals in their homes.

Likewise, US support for Ukraine, active military involvement in Middle Eastern conflict, and rising military roles in the Pacific (as a deterrent against China seizing a key tech industry power in Taiwan) is not simply an exercise in defending other sovereign nations. Whole energy and trade futures are endangered by regional power plays in which the US stands hopelessly ensnared.

READ: Southern border vs Ukraine’s borders: A dangerous leverage

Currently, one of the only ways out is economic, by deepening investment in local fossil fuels production and diversifying international mining interests. And yet, while making oneself less dependent on existing global energy markets can offer greater internal resilience, it’s not without negative consequences. Fossil fuel production has serious impacts on the environment (to put it mildly), while diversifying mineral mining (e.g., for green energy alternatives) inherently opens oneself up to being entangled in other military actions on foreign shores.

An election for the people

None of the above are easy issues for average citizens to process. With families to raise, jobs to maintain, and bills to pay, who has time for the bigger picture? Fatigued by war, told that certain groups are coming after their children, and fearful of what US funding to other countries might mean for the nation’s capacity to fix domestic woes, the average US voter just wants this whole mess resolved, and for everyday prices to stop giving them grief in the process.

They’re also not exactly sure what might improve direct democracy on a federal level. They’ve just got good reason, from everything they see in the news, to feel that the current order isn’t working. So why not try something even more radical? Why not break the system entirely, and see how it fares?

READ: Argentina and the politics of desperation

In a presidential election cycle that actually cared to empower its average citizens, there would be a solid range of candidates platforming on material issues. US voters would be allowed to hear different leaders hash out what the economic numbers are saying and overlooking, and how best to think about future financial possibilities.

They would also be invited to take a good, hard look at the role of SCOTUS in this republic’s current balance of power, and consider different proposed solutions to its oversights. How might a US voter be assured that quality legislation is being advanced in Congress, and administered well by federal agencies thereafter?

With solid candidates on the stage, they might even be able to hear meaningful debate around US foreign policy. Is “deterrence” working? Is it failing? What alternative strategies could be used to secure a better peace with respect to threats both foreign and domestic? How might the US tackle climate change while still navigating complex support roles in its many military actions overseas?

But instead, US voters this year will be given only one, extreme choice, bolstered by sensationalist and hatemongering politics. They will be forced to endure news cycle after news cycle fixated on the incendiary remarks of one candidate trying to stay out of prison, or on the evasive remarks of a sitting president struggling to retain local and international support for the US’s various missions abroad.

Corporate players will find a way to win this election cycle, no matter what.

But average US citizens have already been robbed of a better democratic contest.

To them now falls the question of how to take it back.