The Spiritual Psychology of Economic Dread

Like it or not, the economy is the top concern of American voters as we approach the election. But it's not about numbers and graphs.

Here’s another perplexing paradox of the 2024 election: a majority of American voters say that Donald Trump will do a better job of “handling the economy” than Joe Biden will. They also say that, despite the stuff liberals and conservatives are obsessed with, the economy is the most important issue in the election.

Voters are also wrong about how the economy is actually doing. According to a survey published this week in The Guardian, 56% think the US is in a recession (it is not), 49% believe the stock market is down (it is at or near record highs), and 49% believe unemployment is at a fifty-year high, though in fact it’s at a fifty-year low.

There’s a constellation of reasons for this phenomenon, but they all boil down to core reality that the sense of economic well-being is not based in rational, fact-based assessments, as classical economics insists, but in emotional, even spiritual factors connected to human evolutionary biology. Which is precisely why Trump is doing so well in the polls.

Here are a few of the stars in that constellation:

• Although the economy is improving, many real-life indicators are pointing the wrong way.  People may not know what the S&P 500 is, but they know that food is more expensive than it has been.  If they’re under 30, they know that they face a bleak economic picture and may be in debt forever.  They know that the rent is too damn high – a fact now firmly established in the economic literature.  So while they’re wrong about these specific indicators, they’re right that times really seem to be tough.

• In contrast to the very visible signs of distress, the harms of Trump’s economic policies – massive tax cuts for the 1%, expansion of the estate tax, weakening protections for workers – are largely invisible. Just looking at the skyline of New York City, you can see that the super-rich are getting super-richer.  But it’s hard to connect the dots between that hoarding of wealth by plutocrats and the scarcity of wealth among everyone else.

• Right-wing media continues to beat the drum about America’s awful economic plight, at once exploiting and stoking fear, insecurity, and anger.  When a third of the country is under the spell of this propaganda machine, it doesn’t take much to get to half.  Meanwhile, reflecting human beings’ inborn negativity bias, there’s a built-in media bias toward bad news.  Even in the mainstream, feel-good stories about the economy doing better are boring – and on the left, they ight seem insensitive, given how many people are still left behind.

• Perhaps most importantly, Trump captures the rage, yearning, and dissatisfaction of those who aren’t benefiting from the positive economic news, whereas Biden does not. This isn’t about numbers; it’s about fear, resentment, and yearning for someone who has the power to make insecurity go away. What’s more fundamental than having a place to sleep and enough food to eat? And is there anything we won’t do to have it?

These factors constellate around the reality that Americans make political choices emotionally, not rationally; communally, not individually; and based on visible cues they can see around them, not invisible data like tax brackets and spending levels. As Drew Westen showed nearly two decades ago in The Political Brain, this is a demonstrable fact.  People vote for leaders who they think understand them, and who they think they can basically trust.  Yes, that includes Donald Trump.

Midjourney made me feel cozy and secure.

This has been a longstanding problem for Democrats – or at least, national Democratic leadership.  As Westen also observed back in 2008, Republicans are generally better at speaking to values, emotions, and fundamental issues of trust than Democrats are.  (Another Westen tidbit, which I just found on

THE KEY

, a Substack about how people make up and change their minds: “I have it on good authority (i.e. off the record) that leading conservatives have chortled with joy as they watched their Democratic counterparts campaign by reciting their best facts and figures, as if they were trying to prevail in a high school debate tournament.”)

Consider the run of Democratic candidates since Ronald Reagan, who epitomized Republican superiority on this point more than anyone.  The party put up several smart wonks, all of whom lost: Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, Hillary Clinton. The Democrats who won were empathic (Bill Clinton) or inspiring (Barack Obama). Or Biden, running against Trump. 

This is sometimes called the “beer test” – the candidate that more Americans wanted to get a beer with usually wins. As we saw with both Hillary Clinton and Obama, there’s a lot of prejudice baked into that test, but it still is a decent shorthand for the personal qualities that, more than policies and prescriptions, make up a lot of people’s minds.  The “soft stuff” is what wins elections.

And that’s true for economic anxiety as well.  The view that “Trump will handle the economy better than Biden” is only factually accurate if you’ve got $10 million or more.  But that’s prefrontal cortex stuff: higher-order thinking, analysis, reasoning.  Tragically for our species, human beings choose leaders more on the basis of their amygdalas and ‘reptilian brains.’ Who will keep me safe? Who understands me?

Just consider the phrase “handle the economy” – notice the notes of competence, strength, maybe masculinity as well. I’m not defending these ways of thinking about leaders—I wish people would make rational decisions based on actual facts and not gendered stereotypes.  But I wish a lot of things.

Obviously, Trump is not actually trustworthy.  But no amount of liberal fact-checking is going to erase his gut-level appeal to large swaths of Americans.  He seems trustworthy because he talks like ‘regular people’ (again, Reagan pioneered this, though he was acting and Trump seems not to be) and expresses their pain, anger and resentment. He’s got our backs, his moderate supporters say. Sure, he’s a little over-the-top, but that’s what you need to get anything done in Washington. Who cares how many lies he’s told when he seems so believable?

But I still have hope.

First, Joe Biden still has a lot of Amtrak Joe in him, despite his age.  When he’s on – as he was at the State of the Union – he’s really on.  He’s able to speak to working Americans’ anxieties, to Black Americans’ anxieties, and even to many liberal Americans’ anxieties.  He empathizes.  He’s got a sense of humor, as we’ve seen in his embrace of the “Dark Brandon” theme, and the fact is, he’s a lot more decent than Donald Trump and I think a lot of swing voters know it. 

I mean, do you really want to get a drink with Donald Trump?  Some people do, of course, but soccer moms, Panera moms, swing voters of whatever persuasion… no way. Biden can’t out-anger Trump, but he can win an election by being the more decent human being.

Second, Biden should call Trump’s bluff when it comes to “handling the economy.”  Let’s snap out of what Democrats have started calling ‘Trump Amnesia’ and remember the chaos and incompetence of the Trump administration.  Trump didn’t “handle the economy” – he put a Goldman Sachs exec in charge of the Treasury Department, tried to kill Obamacare (which is now quite popular), ballooned the national debt, and, yes, gave huge tax breaks to the richest Americans.  Democrats don’t have to say a single number to connect the obscene wealth of the 100 richest families in America with the Republicans’ selling out to them, time and time again.

Finally, Democrats need to remember that no election is about what political junkies think it should be about. So far at least, the issues Americans are most concerned about in the 2024 election are the economy, and inflation first and foremost.  Yes, other issues matter too, including gun policy, crime, terrorism and immigration for conservatives; democracy, abortion, and environmental issues for liberals and, God help us, centrists).  But in poll after poll, the economy is far ahead of everything else, especially for potential swing voters.

This means that we progressives need to get over ourselves.  As I’ve written before, I consider Donald Trump an existential threat to American democracy, and I cannot believe there is a serious chance of him becoming president again.  But most people don’t think the way I think. They are concerned about putting food on the table and paying the rent. 

Of course, it’s both/and, and Democrats need to run on all potent issues, including democracy, climate, abortion, and the rest. But if you care about any of those issues, you know that the most important thing to do is make sure Donald Trump never enters the White House again.  And that means getting over your and my obsessions, and meeting Americans where they are.  Yes, it’s the economy, stupid—but not the economy of numbers and graphs.  It’s the economy of insecurity and safety, dread and hope.  And it isn’t stupid.

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Greetings from the extremely hot Northeast; I’m glad I’m not writing about climate this week. Instead, I wrote about the insurrectionist sympathizers on the Supreme Court for Rolling Stone, just as the news about Justice Alito’s even-greater-than-we-thought sympathy broke. Coincidence? I think so.

I’ve also begun working on two long-term projects on psychedelics and spirituality which I look forward to sharing more about in the future. On that same subject, on May 29 I’ll be co-hosting the free, online book launch for EMBARK, a remarkable new approach to psychedelic therapy by Alex Belser and Bill Brennan. You can register for that here. I’m also helping the Institute for Jewish Spirituality celebrate itself on June 4, when I’ll be talking (online) with Rodger Kamenetz and Jane Eisner about the value of Jewish mindfulness. Registration for that is here.

Now seems like a nice time to promote my Instagram. Insta is the social media platform where I’m most active; this newsletter and that feed are the best ways to stay in touch with what I’m up to. I also post funny memes.

Thanks!