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I don't know if it's wise to get carried away here, they lost a single election, and a lot can happen between this one and the next one. I don't know how things are in the US, but at least in Europe the economic vibes are getting kinda weird, and a 2008-style crash could easily see them rebound. I guess this part of my confusion, it's hard for me to see this election as more than a temporary win.
The economic vibes have been weird in Europe for 15 years now.
Europe is over unless the business weecking EC gets the Milei treatment and Council of Europe and the atrocious ECHR that prevents deportations of illegals gets utterly destroyed.
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I suppose we never really recovered from 2008, but most of the 2010's felt normal-ish to me.
In my particular European country, 2008 threw the entire political system into permanent disarray. Societal trust never recovered, and the infrastructure-debt incurred by the austerity of the 2010s was never paid back.
I have honestly never gotten the feeling that we properly recovered from 2008, despite many economic indicators showing otherwise. The Southern European countries by and large don't even have those.
What is this?
Investment into infrastructure that's needed, but has yet to happen. In other words, it's what is "owed" to your country's infrastructure to keep everything functional at the desired level.
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Speaking for England, we didn’t crash in 2008 exactly, nothing visibly changed. It’s just that from that point, things started slowly deteriorating. The cohort before me were being begged to use up academic funding, mine was scrambling for cash. University fees went up. Salaries went down. Just, very slowly, absolutely everything started getting worse and hasn’t stopped.
Personally I think that the period between Thatcher and 2008 was an illusion. We had nothing real to sell, so we sold our seed corn and our prestige. 2008 was just the day that stopped working.
What was the seed corn that you sold? I’m having a hard time figuring out what you’re thinking of.
Was thinking of things like our utilities, factories (all the car brands), our transport systems, our real estate (all those flats in the centre of our capital being sold to Chinese investors as glorified safety deposit boxes), our engineering (ARM) etc.
All those things are what a country needs to thrive IMO. Most of it was stuff that had broken down after decades of socialism. Despairing of being able to fix those things, or find money to invest in them, we sold them instead. And because we had loads of cash, we told ourselves we were rich and congratulated ourselves on how well we understood the post-industrial globalised world. See Terry Pratchett’s Making Money for an example of the genre. But we weren’t rich any more than an aging dowager who pawns her jewellery, and we understood nothing.
Was there a realistic shot at fixing or investing in those areas, or was selling them the only realistic option in your opinion?
Hard to say. ‘No, they couldn’t be reformed’ is certainly plausible. Things like Rover cars, the mines, and the factories had leveraged their ‘too big to fail’ / ‘we represent national prestige so it’ll look terrible if you let us fail’ for decades and the parasites had run their hosts into the ground.
Thatcher et al either lacked the appetite for a political purge or didn’t think they could pull it off, and chose to destroy or sell them instead. The idea was that whichever German conglomerate bought Jaguar wouldn’t care that it was a British prestige brand, only whether it was profitable or not. (And the current issues Jaguar is having makes the limit of that approach clear).
I wasn’t alive then and I have no idea whether Thatcher had a chance of destroying the unions without killing their hosts. I think it would have been worth trying. The alternative was just delaying decline.
Unfortunately Thatcher’s successors (Blair, Brown, Cameron) drank the Kool Aid along with the rest of the country (plus me to be fair) and started thinking that getting rid of everything except financial services and the ‘creative industries’ had been an inspired act of economic genius rather than an act of desperation.
Like many economists, they seemed to believe that deregulation caused or triggered growth rather than merely removing one set of obstacles to it. So we kept slashing and selling and we didn’t do anything useful with the money.
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Oh certainly, I'm old enough to remember seeing Forty More Years on the shelves at Borders.
But, to take that as a clear analogy, the Republican party that came back and proved Forty More Years and the Obama Coaltion of the Ascendant false, was very different from the Dubya-McCain era party that was defeated. Not as different as some would have you believe, many of the same guys are still involved, and many of the same aims are still pursued. But the changes are obvious and manifold.
The hypothetical Democrats who come back and win the 2026 midterms and then run the table in 2028 against JD Vance would probably look very different from the Harris campaign. Quite likely in ways we don't quite know about yet! McCain was perceived as a bit left of Dubya on social issues, civil and bipartisan, focused on getting money and corporations out of politics, but hawkish and interventionist on national security; the McCain strategy was certainly not the one that lead Republicans to victory in 2016 or 2024.
I mean there are two radically different timelines that result in a Dem win in those years. The Dems winning because they retolled and redid there messaging looks way different from the dems just winning because the worst-case scenario about the amount of damage Trump could do to the economy came true and they just win by default.
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