Election 2024 vindicated the Marxist theory of ideology

Trump's victory and popular complaints about the economy were both driven by material conditions.

Photo by Emil Kalibradov on Unsplash

Democrats faced a puzzle during the second half of Joe Biden’s presidency. On one hand, Biden seemed, by multiple indicators, to have successfully navigated the US economy past the shock of the Covid pandemic in 2020. Inflation rates had fallen, unemployment was low, and GDP was booming. On the other hand, however, poll after poll showed that Americans were unhappy with the Biden economy. Most conspicuously, by mid-2022 consumer sentiment had plummeted to its lowest point since the University of Michigan began tracking it in the late seventies.

For American Marxists, the explanation was straightforward. Marxist views of ideology hold that people’s ideas, attitudes, and perceptions are always shaped by the material conditions that they live in. Therefore, if people were overwhelmingly unhappy with the economy, there was probably a good reason. That certain macroeconomic indicators couldn’t explain public opinion was irrelevant because if you looked closely enough you’d be sure to find something.

Among liberals, however, this answer was unsatisfactory. For one thing, the premise that there were serious problems beneath the surface of the Biden economy was intolerable to partisan Democrats. Perhaps more importantly, however, this critique relied on Marxist ideas that were simply too deterministic for liberal takes. The notion that public opinion was so predictably formed by economic conditions didn’t leave enough room for free will and individuality, both indispensable tenets of liberal ideology.

So the stage was set for a debate that pit wonkish analyses of the economy against each other, that pit Democratic pundits against critics on their left, and that pit Marxist theories of ideology against their liberal counterpart – which in the age of Biden became an ad hoc theory of “vibes”.