I following two tweets catch my eye:
On one level, both types of “gotcha” tweets, implicitly arguing that JD Vance committed an immigration offense. But I’m more interested in something else—what motivated Vance to make this claim?
Political statements can be evaluated in many different ways. One might consider them to be expressing a politician’s opinion. But it is also worth thinking about why the statement was made. Politicians have many different views—but what determines which views are expressed in a political campaign?
It seems to be common sense that successful politicians often present ideas that they believe will attract voters. Note that I am not commenting on the integrity of politicians. Whether they believe “X is true”, or they don’t believe X is true, they won’t be inclined to campaign “X is true” unless they think the message is working.
In this case, I’m not particularly interested in what Vance believes. But I am very interested what Vance believes that the public believes. The fact that Vance is pushing this argument on the campaign trail suggests that he believes the public doesn’t see America as among the wealthiest countries in the world.
It would be interesting for a pollster to ask the public whether the US or China is a richer country. I suspect a large portion of the respondents would say “China” (although not a majority.) Yes, the US is rich many times over.
Here’s another good question. “Is the US complying with international trade rules while other countries cheat?” Again, I would expect a lot of wrong answers. (Yes, we often cheat.)
It seems to me that when society is optimistic about the state of the country, the idea of nationalism is less attractive. If you go back to the era when the US was clearly number one, say 1965, the public mood was very supportive of global institutions. When the public believes that other countries are ahead of the US, especially if they believe that other countries are cheating to get ahead, then the public is likely to become more nationalistic.
A few months ago, I you made a post pointing to the strange fact that the US was the country that welcomed the most immigrants and was the richest country. Taken at face value, Vance’s statement can be considered the exact same as my post. Despite using the word “if”, however, it is a clear consequence of his statement that the US is not a very rich country. But at least Vance and I agree on one thing—one fact implies another. We agree that the correlation between the high level of American immigration and America’s position in the list of the richest countries in the world is likely cause.
Now we just need to find out whether America is the richest country, or not.