We can arbitrarily designate February 3rd, 2020 as the true beginning of this year. The Superbowl is done and dusted. The Iowa caucus is tonight and at the present time, it looks like a Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden duopoly with Michael Bloomberg lurking in the wings.
Forecasting the general election is a hopeless task. If Trump had been a generic Republican, he would be romping home leaving the competition in the dust. Trump is Trump, neither sui generis nor a standard Republican. But, who is Trump exactly from a sociocultural perspective? If you talk to progressives, chances are you'll get the usual fascist analogs which are boring since they don't quite fit. Talking to conservatives is not helpful either since pro-Trump conservatives present a hagiographic picture which is laughably at odds with the facts. I believe that a developmental perspective is required and one that differentiates economic and cultural lines of development.
For the sake of simplicity, let's divide the cultural arena that (western) people inhabit as traditional, Enlightenment, relativistic and dialectical. Before you quibble that people can be found at lower and higher cultural levels (as the Ken Wilber/integral people will surely do), that's not the point. We need a taxonomy to fit traditional, modern, postmodern and holistically inclined people and this is as good as any. This way fundamentalists (but not only fundamentalists) mainly inhabit the traditional tier, post-traditional rationalists (with clear cut distinctions between facts and opinions) inhabit the Enlightenment tier, postmodern (it's all relative) people inhabit the relativistic tier and finally systemic, historically and holistically inclined people occupy the dialectical tier.
Similarly, let's divide the economic arena into union, corporate, green communitarian and creatives. People with almost no control over their economic futures inhabit the union tier, a majority are in the corporate tier (with an enterprise dictating their lives), a smaller fraction are post-corporate and post-union with green communities being their focus and an even smaller minority is self-driven with economic lives dependent on creative output.
With these taxonomies in place, we can now pigeonhole the Trump and Democratic coalitions. The Trump coalition mainly comprises traditionalists and some modernists on the cultural side and mainly corporatists on the economic side. The Democratic coalition comprises modernists and postmodernists on the cultural side and mainly union workers, some corporatists and nearly all green communitarians on the economic side.
Given this socioeconomic backdrop, we turn to the actual economy. While unemployment is around 3.6% and GDP growth in 4Q 2019 around 2.5% (projected), the economy looks to be in pretty good shape until you look closer: the key fact is that 44% of Americans (or about 53 million people) between the ages of 18-64 make less than $20,000 a year. This indicates that the middle class has imploded with a clear separation between the corporate class and the other economic classes. But, unless this economic underbelly gets publicly exposed this year (somehow), the corporate class will hold sway over the perception of the economy, fighting tooth and nail to keep the party going. The cultural picture is also very straightforward: all you need is to focus on the existential threat of global warming and climate change to neatly sever the culture into two non-overlapping segments. But, unless there's a climate "event" of some kind to bring this front and center, it's unlikely to motivate voter turnout which is key this year.
The plain fact of the matter is that the re-election of a president is almost always guaranteed when the first term is from the opposite party (think Obama 2012, Bush 2004, Clinton 1996, Reagan 1984 and Carter 1980 but not Bush 1992 or Hoover 1932). While Trump has a weak coalition and has huge personal flaws, he stands a good chance of being re-elected (based on economic data alone) unless something dies. (Only Jimmy Carter did not get re-elected from a similar position in the past 100 years as Benjamin Harrison's re-election bid was in 1892.) For an economic death, we probably need a black swan event to expose the inequality underbelly highlighted above; similarly we probably need a black swan climate event to expose the traditionalist cultural underbelly. Black swans cannot be predicted in advance since duh, they're black swans. However, it's clear that we are at a late stage in this economic cycle (with supply side economics which began in 1980 almost certainly dead by the end of this decade). Similarly, it's also clear that the boomer generation (average age 60) which is in charge of cultural values will head off into the sunset this decade with millennials (average age 30) taking over as cultural arbiters. Since we're at the cusp of both these transitions, we can confidently say that American culture is ready to blow and consequently, 2020 is going to be one for the ages and a year that we will all remember for a long, long time.
