Bothsidesing, With a Republican Slant: Here We Go Again

Election results don’t change the facts

I’ve tried to maintain a light tone in this newsletter, with plenty of snark. But sometimes I do get angry. Apologies.

During my first year writing for the Times, which was also an election year, I wrote about how George W. Bush had been able to get away with clearly false claims about the budget in part because the media bent over backwards to appear even-handed:

If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline ''Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.''

Since then, Republican lies — and yes, the major ones have consistently come from the G.O.P. — have gotten ever bigger, but the insistence on bothsidesing when there aren’t two sides remains, with an increasing Republican tilt.

I found a lot to agree with in Jonathan Weisman’s big piece on how Democrats lost the working class, although he barely mentions the extent to which Republicans have followed anti-worker policies, including attempts to privatize Social Security and kill the Affordable Care Act. Reagan, in particular, didn’t just do “trickle-down,” he did a lot to crush unions while cutting taxes on high incomes and raising them on most workers, and presided over trade deficits, deindustrialization and a huge surge in inequality.

Still, Obama should have done much more to hold Wall Street accountable for the financial crisis — I thought at the time and still think that at least one major bank should have been put under temporary receivership, if only to make it clear that the bailout had strings attached. I also agree that Democrats, Obama in particular, tried to keep the postwar agenda of trade liberalization going well past its sell-by date; in 2015 I came out against the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (and had a very awkward conversation with, let’s say, a very senior official as a result.)

Biden, however, was the most pro-worker president we’ve had in generations, only to find his political prospects dimmed by inflation. So whose fault was that?

Well, if you ask me, readers deserve more than this:

Democrats said the president was the political victim of a global trend emerging from the pandemic. Republicans pointed to his policies, and one piece of legislation in particular, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, saying it poured gasoline on the smoldering embers of post-pandemic inflation.

OK, Democrats say one thing, Republicans say another. Views differ on shape of planet. But what are the facts? Shouldn’t readers at least be told that cumulative inflation since the start of the pandemic has been pretty much the same in all advanced countries, which sure seems to support the Democratic narrative that Biden’s policies weren’t responsible?

Now, you can still find ways to blame the A.R.P. for some U.S. inflation; the best one, I think, is to claim that Europe was more vulnerable to the Putin shock than we were, so we should have had less inflation, and the fact that we didn’t can be attributed to excess stimulus. But that’s a fairly convoluted argument and probably doesn’t work numerically. At any rate, readers should know that the raw fact is that America didn’t have higher inflation than other advanced economies — yet Weisman not only doesn’t tell readers that, he slants the narrative by giving the last word to a Republican asserting that it was all Biden’s fault.

More fundamentally, election results shouldn’t change your economic analysis — especially after an election decided by low-information voters who believed Trump’s promise, which he instantly abandoned after the vote, that he would bring down grocery prices. If you believed that Biden’s economic policy was bad, you should have continued to believe that even if Harris had won. If you believed his policy was good, Trump’s win shouldn’t change that conclusion.

Don’t let the political victors rewrite history, economic or otherwise.

MUSICAL CODA

So many things we could have done, but false equivalence got in the way