Great Expectations, Or: Give Us What We Want Or The Country Gets It!

The gap between the first and second editions of Disorder Up was longer than it will usually be, owing to family travel and also the norovirus (two great tastes that taste great together!). Thanks for your patience, and for the frankly unexpected degree of support this has gotten. Y’all are the best.

Anger, a wise man (my father) once told me, is the product of unmet expectations, and this political and cultural moment, which I’m calling The New Disorder, is certainly long on both. In my last piece, I laid out this substack’s thesis and reason for existing:

The New Disorder is a series of institutions and individuals fundamentally, serially, and baroquely failing to meet the expectations of the majority of the people whom they notionally serve. It is a systemic phenomenon and should be discussed as such.

The systemic element is the critical one, and it’s worth reiterating: single failures of institutions or individuals are interesting and illustrative (and occasionally grimly entertaining), but reviewing each in isolation misses that they collectively comprise a phenomenon large enough to be the dominant ethos of our time.

The belief in government as an instrument of improving people’s lives doesn’t even fully permeate the Democratic Party.

The American political scientist Brian Klaas wrote a terrific illustration of the breadth of the problem, and in so doing made a material contribution to the canon of The New Disorder, in a recent edition of The Atlantic. In “Democracy Has a Customer-Service Problem” Klaas makes the point that democracy depends on two kinds of legitimacy: input legitimacy (were the votes counted properly and fairly?) and output legitimacy (is the government effective?). You should read the whole thing, but Klaas’s point is that a lack of faith in government’s ability to solve problems is undermining collective belief in democracy; he cites a recent study showing that 39% of Americans have faith in government’s ability to solve problems, down from 60% twenty years ago. This would mean that belief in government as an instrument of improving people’s lives - the core creed of FDR, JFK, and LBJ - doesn’t even fully permeate the Democratic Party.

Politics is experiential and anecdotal for all but a small class of people (of which most readers of this substack are probably members); it’s based on what they’ve seen or felt, and stories told by people they know. Those experiences can be framed or re-framed, in good faith and bad, by politicians or media companies; indeed, luridly hijacking viewers’ perceived reality is Fox News’s entire business model. But those experiences cannot be invented, nor can they be denied. Newly-elected Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has astutely made the point that to someone whose catalytic converter has been stolen out of their car, and their emergency fund (should they even have one) depleted as a result, property crime is out of control. Any response other than sensitivity and shared outrage will come across as benighted or worse.

And lived experience, for many Americans, features a truly staggering number of disappointed expectations. Some of these are the kind of blows that profoundly shape a person’s life. Here’s an old piece about what happens when manufacturing jobs leave a community: among other things, marriage and fertility rates fall. The ensuing unemployment isn’t just a financial problem - for men (the traditional holders of the now-absent jobs), the path that their fathers and grandfathers followed to the satisfaction and purpose of marriage and fatherhood is abruptly closed to them, with no clear alternative in sight. Women who want children, meanwhile, are forced to choose amongst partnering with men who are “economically unviable” (now there’s a euphemism to turn your hair white - ed.), moving away from their families in search of partners with better prospects, or single parenthood. Delightful stuff! “How,” we Dems wonder in the sleepless watches of the night, “how did we lose Ohio?”

Disappointed expectations come in smaller forms, too. In his piece on democracy, Klaas praises the Biden Administration’s decision to go after so-called junk fees (the bullshit “here’s the purchase price, and here’s an added price we’ve tacked on for no apparent reason” charges now ubiquitous in commerce) as a good example of government rectifying its customer-service problem. He’s right. Similarly, praise is due to the FCC’s renewed attention to scam texts, and a legislative push for an airline passengers’ bill of rights. 

Individually, these are sensible (indeed, apparently no-brainer) regulatory actions. Collectively, they might represent the first steps in a broader correction of an old mistake that fundamentally contributed to the rise of the New Disorder.

I asked an AI image generator to give me disorder at the airport. Certainly captures the spirit!

Let’s take that last item, the airline passengers’ bill of rights. There are two primary thrusts to the idea of explicit regulations on behalf of airline passengers. One of them is to guarantee what you receive when you buy a ticket and a flight proceeds normally; most proposals along these lines are to do with flight conditions like seat size. The second is what happens when something goes wrong, such as when a flight is substantially delayed or canceled outright, or a passenger is bounced from a flight because the airline overbooked it. The short version of those proposals is that refunds and compensation would be due and - crucially - quickly.

None of those ideas are especially new. In fact, most come from the airlines themselves. Major air carriers used to have budgets for that sort of thing, and staffed customer-service departments to coordinate them. The hollowing of those departments, the disappearance of those budgets, and the physical shrinking of the seats are all the airline manifestation of what is sometimes called soft inflation, which, bluntly, is what happens when customers get less service or product for the same amount of money (as opposed to inflation, when buyers notionally get the same amount of something at a higher cost).

Soft inflation has been with us for more than a decade, justified - when it’s noticed at all - as an essential measure in order to preserve a company’s financial survival. Airlines, in particular, love to poor-mouth themselves and blame high fuel costs for rising ticket prices and cut services. How badly have those high fuel prices cut into airline profitability? Delta stock is worth four times what it was in 2010; United, a whopping six times; and Southwest, two-and-a-half times its 2010 value (even after its December debacle). American Airlines has had the rockiest decade of the American big carriers, but even its COVID 2020 nadir was higher than its 2010 peak stock price.

The point is that the airlines have had the ability to spend on refunds and compensation and customer service, if they chose to. But they did not choose to, because why should they? None of their competitors were.

None of their competitors were. This is the core of soft inflation, and it is hardly confined to the airline industry, as corporate bodies have slashed their budgets for “cost-centers” like customer service, and because they are all doing it, suffer no competitive disadvantage. If an industry workforce were to take the same approach - show up to work for, say, 85% of the day instead of 100% - it’d be called a strike. If customers were to collectively decide to pay 85% of a debt for goods and services instead of 100%, it’d be called a boycott. So it’s worth calling soft inflation what it is.

Soft inflation is a capital strike, paid for largely by American consumers. Most of the customer-service problems of democracy that I cited above derive from this capital strike in some way. Mobile connectivity companies could collectively decide on a campaign to end scam texts tomorrow (and some have made moves in that direction in the past), but they don’t see protecting their customers in this way as their job, at least not so far as they’ll budget for it. Junk fees are closer to inflation, in that customers are paying more for less, but what separates them from normal inflation is that rising prices aren’t associated with a change in monetary value or market conditions - customers just get to pay more because the companies charging junk fees can get away with it. And so we proceed about our days, paying a monthly bill for a device that allows thieves to treat us like marks in our own homes, and shelling out nonsense fees that don’t even pretend to be attached to an actual service.

What effect does this have on the expectations of the average American? Unless you are wealthy enough to insulate yourself from the consequences of this sorry state of affairs, you can go through life confident that, though you have (to borrow the phrase) worked hard and played by the rules, you will pay increasing amounts for less at virtually every turn, and that any mistake or dispute between you and a corporate entity will be resolved to that corporation’s favor except by the application of hours and hours’ worth of your own time and increasingly strained executive function, with no support or relief in sight. 

What response to this would be rational except anger? Can we truly claim to be surprised that American politics has become a bit, ah, eccentric?

America has been governed for forty years by two parties, one of which believes that government should not try to make people’s lives better, and the other of which internalized the belief that government can not make people’s lives better.

Let’s not spend much time on the Republican side of the Reaganite consensus - it’s a matter of public record that Reaganism is overtly hostile to the idea of a society in which government acts as a tool of the people’s will in order to improve the material conditions of their lives through direct action. 

It’s a bit of an overstatement that Democrats believe government can not make people’s lives better, but not by much. It would be more accurate to say that the leadership of the party, particularly the people who came of age during the days when the Reaganite consensus carried all before it, have taken on a powerful belief that voters do not want government to try too hard to make their lives better or easier, and require that Democrats extensively seek the permission of Republicans before making any effort at all. 

The effect is to cause Americans to lose faith in the very idea of democracy itself.

How this came about will be the subject of future writing (and has been much-and-well-discussed elsewhere), but suffice to say that both of these convictions exist in the absence of enduring evidence to support them and the presence of a growing pile of public sentiment research showing that the effect of this approach is to cause Americans to lose faith in the very idea of democracy itself. 

The remedy for this can be seen, on a small but worthy scale, in regulatory actions like eliminating junk fees, stopping scam texts, and passing an airline passengers’ bill of rights, because each recognizes a fundamental truth: if corporations will not spend on providing fair deals to customers voluntarily, they must be compelled to by the appointed instrument of the people’s will. 

To put it simply: whose job is it to protect you from bullshit fees and scams and predatory practices? It’s the government’s job, that’s who. This seems obvious, but for more than forty years this has, quietly or loudly, been a profoundly disputed point in American politics.

Winning back the trust of American voters for their democracy will require answers to the hard, brutal, big questions like how we shape a path to a life of security and dignity in areas of the country blighted by unemployment and deaths of despair. But it will also happen when political leaders fully embrace the reality that Americans are not leery of the government acting on their behalf against predatory corporate practices, large and small. In fact, we want that. 

We expect it.