The reasons for Donald Trump's success will be debated for a long time yet. How could a majority of Americans vote to return to the White House a man who, four years earlier, had shown his utter contempt for the very foundations of democracy?

"It's the economy, stupid!" the answer, regularly repeated since Bill Clinton's victorious campaign against George H.W. Bush (in 1992), seems to be confirmed by the multitude of opinion polls and surveys published over the last few months. But how is it that the rising price of eggs has led many Americans to elect a man who could transform the United States into a plutocracy?

After all, if you look closely, the US economy is not doing at all badly right now. The generosity of the federal budget has enabled activity to pick up strongly in the wake of the pandemic. Inflation, which had also surged, is in the process of being controlled. The Federal Reserve did not need to provoke a recession to achieve this: for the past two years, growth has remained solid and unemployment close to record lows.

Desperately low incomes

But price levels have not dropped, particularly in terms of food prices. The same is true of house prices, which were pushed up by low interest rates at the end of the last decade. As for rents, they have exploded under the impact of lifestyle changes linked to the pandemic, the influx of migrants and supply shortages. The truth is that, under Joe Biden's presidency, daily living conditions have grown tougher for many Americans.

The fact that factories have been built at unprecedented rates in future-oriented industries, that wages for the lowest-paid jobs have rarely risen at such a pace, and that the Black unemployment rate has never been so close to that of Whites, does not alter one reality: Incomes for a large proportion of American households remain desperately low, while the wealth of a small minority, buoyed by steadily rising share prices, has never been so high. After several decades of capitalism largely left to its own devices, the promised trickle-down effect seems more like a drip, and the economy's prosperity is ever more poorly shared.

Those widening inequalities have contributed to a profound erosion of social cohesion, an erosion further aggravated by the still highly unequal quality of education and healthcare to which Americans have access. This quality reflects the value, also highly unequal, that American democracy places on the lives of its citizens.

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