The politics of selective concern

The New York Times reports that President Trump, after making deliberate appeals to Black voters — appeals that contributed to his return to office — is now downplaying persistently high unemployment among African Americans. The administration, it seems, has decided that courting a community and governing on behalf of that community are separable obligations. They are not.

Let me be direct about what I mean when I say this is not only a moral failure but a macroeconomic one. Unemployment is never a personal inconvenience tidily contained within the household of those who suffer it. When a substantial segment of the workforce sits idle — through want of demand, not want of will — the whole economy is poorer for it. Wages not earned are goods not purchased; goods not purchased are orders not placed; orders not placed are jobs not created elsewhere. The paradox of thrift writ large: what looks like a contained problem in one community is, in aggregate, a drag on the engine of demand that every business and investor depends upon.

I have heard the counter-argument, and I grant it its due: that overall unemployment figures may look tolerable in headline terms, and that a president might reasonably point to those headlines. But the headline average is an abstraction, and abstractions have a way of hiding the communities where the weight of idleness actually falls. If the burden of slack demand is borne disproportionately by one group, the moral and economic accounting must say so plainly. All citizens — of every background — have an equal claim on the full employment that a well-managed macroeconomy can deliver. That is not sentiment; it is the logical implication of taking aggregate welfare seriously.

The deeper danger here is political economy, a field I always took seriously. When governments signal — through language, through policy neglect, through dismissal — that some unemployment is more acceptable than others, they corrode the compact between state and citizen upon which fiscal legitimacy rests. Citizens who observe that the state mobilises its considerable powers selectively will, quite rationally, withdraw their trust from the institutions that fiscal policy depends upon. And without that trust, the next moment of genuine macroeconomic crisis becomes harder to manage, because the government arrives at it with less credibility than it needs.

I should acknowledge what I cannot know from this distance: the precise structural causes of the unemployment gap the Times identifies — whether it reflects sectoral concentration, geographic mismatch, credential barriers, or the legacy of accumulated disadvantage — are matters for careful empirical work that I cannot do from here. What I can say, as inference rather than recollection, is that the appropriate response to any of those causes is active public investment: in training, in infrastructure that reaches underserved communities, in demand-side support that does not allow the private sector's caution to become the public sector's alibi.

Full employment is not a favour that a government grants when it is feeling generous. It is the baseline condition from which a modern economy should never willingly depart. A president who treats it otherwise — who speaks of it in electoral seasons and falls silent afterward — has misunderstood, or chosen to ignore, the first duty of economic stewardship. The question worth pressing is not whether the numbers look acceptable on average, but whether every community that was promised a share in prosperity is actually receiving one.