The one joke I remember from Colin Jost’s address to the 2024 White House Correspondents’ Dinner is that online gambling and Taylor Swift are all that’s keeping the economy afloat. It plays to Americans’ locked-in impression that the economy is terrible and that’s why they have soured on Joe Biden.

The reality behind this contorted belief is that Americans’ own spending habits have created and are sustaining this economy. Their continued spending is what propels corporations to keep raising prices. Their gambling and speculation in crypto despite previous busts is inflating markets to new highs. Their bloated retirement investments are making asset managers richer and richer—and that money is going directly into further speculative pursuits, especially anything related to AI.

Granted, this is not true of all Americans, but it is happening alongside the frightening escalation of costs for fundamental public needs (rents, medical care, childcare, insurance of every kind) that are never coming back down no matter what the Fed does with interest rates. What this amounts to is a garbage economy, and if Americans vote in Donald Trump to give tax cuts to themselves and the Fortune 500, it will be a garbage economy on fire.

The media carries story after story about how regular Americans are hurting in this economy because they have run out of savings, are living paycheck to paycheck, and have run up credit card debt and outstanding buy-now-pay-later balances. Anything happens with the economy and these people are in serious trouble. But a FOMO mindset continues to run deep across Americans of every social class: keep spending no matter what. The pandemic didn’t help matters by giving people the illusion that when things get bad for everyone, the government will start depositing money into your checking account.

The parallel ignorance of the people who will never know anything and those who ought to know something is astounding. Jost’s joke paints a painfully accurate portrait of Americans in 2024: compulsive gamblers willing to take on exponential risk because they are impulsive and unable to delay gratification. They blame Biden for the consequences of their decisions to cave to corporate America, and they have faith that the antidote is a bigger dose of the same poison. They have no capacity to envision “better” other than “more.”

For a while now, a line from “Going Underground,” a 1977 song from the British rock band The Jam, has stuck in my head: the public wants what the public gets. It’s a great song—among the first wave of protest against Thatcherism’s blindsiding of half the country. But that cheeky twist of phrase describes a chilling reality in 2024: the colossus of corporate America, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley have such control over our lives that they no longer try to make us want what they put out; we willingly (and even lustfully) want something precisely because they have put it out.

Joe Biden does not want to preside over a garbage economy, but he inherited the reins of Republicans’ crackup capitalism under the enormous weight of a global pandemic. The choice is not even one of policies; it’s an existential conflict between responsible governance and self-gratifying self-delusion. As Paul Weller sings in “Going Underground”: I don’t get what this society wants. I don’t think Joe Biden does either. §