So from that angle the 2024 defeat was downstream of failures by local/state Dems as much, if not more, than national Dems. That tells us a lot more than “inflation”, which aggregates a bunch of issues. But it’s a narrative which is completely absent in 2024 postmortems.
That gives us a better understanding of how dynamics played out in 2021-2024 though! Real Inflation was something the Biden admin did the best it could to manage, little room for improvement. Addressing housing costs was something primarily local/state Dems needed to handle - they failed.
“inflation” meant a variety of different issues depending on who you asked. It’s a catch-all term which is acceptable to cite when asked, like “the economy”. So when trying to disentangle the results 2024 you can’t take the salience of “inflation” on its face.
That’s what I’m poking at - “inflation” was a broader feeling of frustration with the post-Covid world and nostalgia for the past, some of it grounded in real COL issues and some of it in other frustrations. So saying that “inflation” decided 2024 obscures more than it reveals.
Putting that under “inflation” only makes sense if “inflation” is a stand in for many different things, most of which were not caused by the actual inflation which spiked after Covid.
Post-Covid supply chain inflation wasn’t the sole or even main cause of increased housing costs, which continued to grow after it peaked. Some cities were even able to bring housing costs down during the same period through good policies.
I think lean-Dems that stayed home were a more winnable contingent than true swing voters. I don’t think a win is a shoe-in with tactical changes, but we’re talking about a relatively narrow margin to get a slim EC win.
Dems overperformed around when inflation peaked and underperformed long after the peak had passed. Lower and middle income voters had plenty to complain about, but very little of that stemmed from inflation even if they rhetorically blamed it.
A Harris campaign which publicly distanced itself from the Biden administration, even as kayfabe more than real disagreements, had a good chance of eeking out a narrow win.
Blaming COL increases from things like the expiration of the child tax credit on “inflation” even if that wasn’t really the cause. There’s a material explanation for voter behavior there, but it weaves in and out of socially constructed filters which makes it hard to untangle “real” from “fake”.
The main effect of inflation and the tight labor market was to embitter “elites”, “opinion makers”, and higher income Americans more generally. That unhappiness than trickled down to “inflation” as a widely accepted thing to blame even if most low/middle income Americans benefitted from it.
I think “inflation” as named by voters was mostly a stand in for “things are different since Covid and I want to go back to 2019”. Similar to how “the economy” is a socially acceptable and easy to name stand in for many things voters desire, often unrelated to the actual economy.
Likewise, the concept of “Two Main Blows” which Rokossovsky and Stalin (probably) argued about in May 1944 took several iterations of planning, consultation with commanders, and combat experience from February-May ‘44. Athena very much did *not* emerge from Zeus ‘ head fully formed.
None of the commands which arrived at the confluence of the Dnieper and Berezina in November ‘43 had any experience fighting in wooded and swampy terrain. Figuring out these issues took time and experience, including negative ones.
An interesting point that gets made in the book “Operation Bagration: ‘Both Blows are the Main One’” - probably the single best book on 1st BelF’s leg of Bagration - is the importance of learning and trial-and-error in the Red Army’s ‘43-‘44 experience.
I really enjoy Kunz’s *Wehrmacht und Niederlage* because of how unsentimentally it portrays the suicidal, destructive improvisations of the German armed forces in the final year of the war.
de Boer of 26 ID has a note in his personnel file by his Corps commander, Block of LVI PzK, for being unwilling to use the “harshest measures” to defend the Bug River line and failing to acclimate to the introduction of the “German salute”. He was transferred to a division command in Norway.
Much of the senior leadership fell back on tropes rather than solutions. NS leadership and the most “ruthless”, “harshest” methods - meaning the threat or use of weapons.
One thing that really stands out in reports on the condition of German soldiers on the retreat in 1944 is the immense physical exertion in a largely foot-mobile army on the move. You have soldiers soiling themselves and too exhausted to care. Marching in rags and barefoot. Apathetic to life.
Playing the restrainer with Ukraine undermined U.S. interests. Refusing to restrain Israel also undermined U.S. interests. Was the Biden NatSec/Defense team just allergic to winning? Scared of being a global superpower, with all the responsibilities that came with it?
I remember articles from 2021-22 talking about how Israel was doing everything imaginable to fuck over any attempt to re-engage Iran on a nuclear framework. Netanyahu was a blatantly partisan actor for almost a decade prior to 10/7, the failure to work with that reality is entirely on Biden.
As it starts losing, it gains more and more processing power to invest in technological breakthroughs - time travel, the T-1000, etc. - but it also loses the material/resources it needs to win. So the last months of the war are it producing insane Hail Marys it couldn’t think of beforehand.
There’s one fanfic which discusses the difficulties Skynet’s control-freak tendencies cause it. Even Terminators have limited autonomy unless reprogrammed. So Skynet has to invest a massive amount of processing power into directly managing the global war all at once.
