The United States, thankfully, has never experienced inflation in its worst instances. But we have perhaps gotten a taste for its radicalizing effect on politics over the last decade. Overall, inflation levels have remained extremely low since the early 1980s, but there are pockets of inflation — in higher education, for instance. Is it so surprising that young, educated people are espousing the radical ideas advocated by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? The inflated price of college education has placed them under a mountain of debt that many of them can never hope to pay off fully. The idea of canceling the debts must surely sound appealing to them…

This is why Biden should worry. There is no way for him or his team to spin their way out of an inflation problem. They cannot pretend that it doesn’t exist because everybody experiences it every day. They cannot pretend that it is not the fault of the federal government, because the government alone oversees the currency. Likewise, blaming entanglements in foreign trade is a fool’s errand because the federal government has the exclusive power to regulate international commerce (and, anyway, most of our food is produced domestically).

And if in large doses inflation leads to political unrest and even revolution, in moderate doses, it makes people unhappy about their current circumstances and pessimistic about their futures. Inflation in the 1970s did not lead to a Jacobin Revolution, but it certainly contributed to the Reagan Revolution, as the country broadly rejected the New Deal/Great Society consensus that had dominated our politics since the 1930s.