Rethinking Democracy 112: Economics vs. Trumpconomics: The Knowledge Gap Since Just Before 2016, the Rise of Exism Movements, and the Policy Challenge of Responding to a Different Rationality

Abstract

The coming of BREXIT and USEXIT in 2016 marked a major change in the majority-rule liberal-democratic political landscape and created a paradigm-shift knowledge gap that appears to remain insufficiently recognized, where BREXIT and USEXIT refer to two different extreme majority rule based liberal democratic outcomes. Before 2016, competition for political power within majority-rule liberal democracies could generally be understood as competition among different choices operating under a broadly parallel economic rationality: the pursuit of policies intended to maximize the welfare of the true majority and, by extension, the country. Since 2016, however, competition has increasingly involved a different structural possibility: competition between normal liberal democracy and temporary authoritarianism, where the political rationality of the latter may be oriented toward maximizing the welfare of the ruler, a true minority, or an exism movement rather than the welfare of the true majority. This shift creates an economic-rationality knowledge gap. When temporary authoritarianism is interpreted as another form of normal liberal-democratic competition, its policies and threats are evaluated and addressed through the parallel economic rationality appropriate to normal democratic competition. The result can be a mismatch between the rationality underlying the policy or strategy being confronted and the rationality underlying the response to it. In this paper, this distinction is expressed through the concepts of Economics and Trumpconomics. Traditional economic thinking represents the parallel economic rationality associated with normal liberal-democratic competition, whereas Trumpconomics is introduced as a conceptual representation of the inverse economic rationality associated with temporary authoritarianism. The paper argues that the failure to recognize this rationality shift can help explain why exism movements were not initially recognized as structurally different political competitors and why normal liberal democracies may develop policy responses that address inverse-rationality strategies as if they were generated by parallel-rationality competitors. Under such conditions, policies intended to protect the welfare of the majority can have effects that, depending on the policy and context, may instead benefit the ruler, the true minority, or the exism movement while imposing avoidable costs on the majority. The goal of this paper is therefore to connect the shift from Economics to Trumpconomics with the rise of temporary authoritarianism and to examine the policy challenge created when normal liberal democracies respond to inverse economic rationality as though it were parallel economic rationality. The central issue is not whether the two forms of rationality are politically preferable, but whether recognizing the structural difference between them can help close the knowledge gap created by the post-2016 paradigm shift and improve the consistency of policy responses to a different form of political-economic competition.