Is America in eclipse?
Most Americans apparently think so. I won’t cite the polling; you’re all familiar with it. Instead, listen to Frank Bruni, the multi-talented former NYT correspondent and restaurant critic who now teaches at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. He has a new book coming out soon, The Age of Grievance, and The Atlantic recently ran an excerpt: The Politics of Pessimism - The Atlantic.
American dream. American exceptionalism. Land of opportunity. Endless frontier. Manifest destiny. Those were the pretty phrases that I grew up with. We were inventors, expanders, explorers. Putting the first man on the moon wasn’t just a matter of bragging rights—though it was indeed that, and we bragged plenty about it. It was also an act of self-definition, an affirmation of American identity. We stretched the parameters of the navigable universe the way we stretched the parameters of everything else.
That perspective, obviously, was a romanticized one, achieved through a selective reading of the past. It discounted the experiences of many Black Americans. It minimized the degree to which they and other minorities were shut out from all of this inventing and exploring. It mingled self-congratulatory fiction with fact. . .
It was nonetheless true that the idea of the United States as an unrivaled engine of social mobility and generator of wealth held sway with many Americans, who expected their children to do better than they’d done and their children’s children to do even better. That was the mythology, anyway. Sure, we hit lows, but we climbed out of them. We suffered doubts, but we snapped back. . . .
I don’t detect that optimism around me anymore. In its place is a crisis of confidence, a pervasive sense among most Americans that our best days are behind us, and that our problems are multiplying faster than we can find solutions for them. It’s a violent rupture of our national psyche. It’s a whole new American pessimism. . .
To recognize those dynamics is to understand America’s current politics, in which so many politicians—presidential candidates included—whip up support less by talking about the brightness of the country’s future than by warning of the apocalypse if the other side wins. They’re not clarions of American glory. They’re bulwarks against American ruin.
This pessimism may well be justified. The United States is an immensely rich country, with plenty of resources to deal with its myriad of problems. But we have a fractured Washington, an outdated voting system, a Presidential candidate and a substantial majority of the Republican Party with no real commitment to democracy, to defending American allies, or to pursuing any serious efforts to overcome such problems as climate change, vast disparities in wealth and income, and a struggling education system.
The United States may well be in decline. But it is not inevitable. To overcome our problems, we certainly need to acknowledge them, but we also should try to avoid obsessing over them. That’s the message of Matt Ygelsias in one of his recent Substack posts.
People who are living in the United States of America in 2024 are living in what is indisputably one of the richest countries on the planet, at a time of unprecedented global prosperity.
And yet, even in a mass culture that’s increasingly consumed by questions of privilege, you rarely hear expressions of gratitude for the reality of that basic good fortune. It’s more common to hear expressions of apocalyptic levels of alarm about living in “a world on fire” or through a series of “unprecedented” traumas. This kind of relentless negativity reflects a kaleidoscopic series of political lenses. Those on the right, of course, want to emphasize the negative right now for partisan reasons. Many on the left also want to emphasize the negative, but to build the case for radical change. Meanwhile, in the sensible center, I think it’s considered cringe (and politically opportunistic) to tell the masses that they are wrong about anything. If the people are upset, only knee-jerk partisanship could be your reason for suggesting they should maybe take a chill pill.
But I think most upper and middle class Americans should, in fact, take a step back.
The world, including the United States of America, obviously has problems, and some things really are trending in a bad direction. And yet this has always been the case. The main thing that has actually changed is that the media landscape has become much more competitive and people (yes, people like you) prefer to click and share on negative stories. So a lot of people spend time doomscrolling, amping up negativity on their social media feeds to maximize engagement, and propagating a worldview that says the best way to be a good citizen is to engage in performative sobbing or raging.
This is all, I think, a mistake.
Trends are broadly positive and have been for a long time. Many bad things continue to happen, but that has always been the case, and problems can generally be solved more effectively by trying to slice them down into specific, narrow pieces rather than lumping everything together. Most negativity results from conscious or unconscious framing choices that compete evolutionarily in a “survival of the most downbeat” framework. The best thing to do to live a happily life is to feel like you are a person with agency and the ability to exert control over the world. And the best way to do that is not to tune out the problems of the world, but to cut down on the doomscrolling and try to think of specific ways you can take action to help with tractable problems.
A better world is not only possible, it’s something we are living through. But to make it even better, you need to do stuff, not talk about how bad everything is. . .
A question that’s come up recently is why tragic deaths in Gaza attract so much more attention in the US than tragic deaths in Yemen or Chad a few years ago or tragic deaths in Sudan right now. One common claim is that because America is allied with Israel, this particular tragedy is something we’re more able to do something about.
But I think on some level, the opposite is true.
There are hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees living in Egypt in dire conditions, and UNCHR needs your money to help take care of them. You can turn money into lives saved very directly via GiveWell’s top charities fund. You can transfer cash directly to some of the poorest people in the world via GiveDirectly. The Israel-Palestine conflict is in a kind of discourse sweet spot where it relates to a lot of identity-linked issues that people feel passionately about but also has extremely low tractability — there isn’t much you, personally, can do about it except post, with the convention being that the more extreme your posts, the more it shows you care. This is, in a sense, convenient. You’re not challenged to put your own money on the line the way you would be if you chose to get invested in something else. But it’s psychologically disempowering and does little good for the world.
Climate has similar dynamics. Yelling that we need to “just stop oil” because “our government doesn’t give a fuck about its responsibilities” puts you way out there on the performative outrage scale.
But even though there’s a strong case for policy action on climate change, there’s also a lot that individuals can do here — in part because the way policy action works is that once the government commits to building out an EV charging network, it still needs people to go buy the electric cars. You can get solar panels on your roof. You can switch to a heat pump. You can eat less meat. If you want to dedicate your life to the cause and not just make petty consumer decisions, you can train as an electrician and literally do the work. If you’re a young and idealistic college student, you can try to gain the science and engineering skills necessary to make real contributions to battery research, carbon capture, industrial decarbonization or any of the many other fields that require more technical work.
It would obviously be a little silly for a person who makes a living writing about politics and policy to take the position that nobody should read articles about the world’s problems.
But I do think most people could stand to be more mindful about their consumption. Are you learning new information about a topic where you are open to changing your mind? Are you consuming content that is helping you make better decisions? Are you entertaining yourself, in the sense of genuinely feeling happier as a result of what you’re reading? Or are you just kind of marinating in ineffectual misery and performative position-taking?
I have a friend who told me back in October that not only would Joe Biden lose the election because of what Israel is doing to Gaza but that he deserves to. At first I dismissed that thinking, but now – after more than six months of disaster – I’m a lot more understanding of his view. Many more Americans than I expected are outraged by what Netanyahu has wrought in his response to the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. If Biden loses in Michigan, with its large Muslim population, and in Wisconsin, where a substantial minority declined to vote for him in the Democratic primary, it would almost certainly tip the election in Trump’s favor. But I don’t think he deserves that fate. Indeed, I think it would be a tragedy.
And it turns out that Alexandra Ocasia-Cortez, far more articularlty than I could, shares that perspective. It’s really worth your time to watch the video below, in which she argues that the only real hope for the adoption of more progressive policies is with Biden in the White House and Democrats holding real power in Congress.
mehdirhasan (@Mehdi Hasan) posted: "What do you say to a young progressive or an Arab-American who says to you, 'I just can't vote for Biden again after what he's enabled in Gaza.'?
Listen to a detailed, thoughtful, & important answer to my Q from @AOC at the Zeteo launch. (Do try & actually listen & not assume!) https://x.com/mehdirhasan/status/1781120448186462407?s=51&t=fc5he6jyufdqV_PMNPU2iw
Jim Fallows, my friend and former colleague, shares a similar perspective. There are only one real choice facing our country on Nov. 5, he writes in his recent Substack post: either Joe Biden or Donald Trump will be the next president.
These past two weeks have been enormously consequential, in both real-world and electoral terms. Vintage-1864 abortion rulings in Arizona. The welcome implosion of ‘No Labels.’ Donald Trump’s first criminal trial, starting tomorrow. The deaths in Gaza of seven people from Jose Andres’s World Central Kitchen, amid the deaths of countless others less renowned. The Israeli attack on an Iranian building in Damascus two weeks ago, and the Iranian counter-attack on Israel last night.1
The post is about how such events register on the timeline of choosing a next president, with less than seven months to go.
1) Presidential elections do not ‘send messages.’ They determine who is going to be in charge.
The history of American politics is of “messages” being conveyed in various ways: That slavery was wrong. That unions deserved a voice, and that women deserved a vote. That segregation was wrong. That wars had gone on too long. That rampant pollution must be stopped. That abortion (in some Americans’ view) was an absolute evil, or that abortion rights (in others’ view) were absolutely essential. These are a few of the messages transmitted through the complex, imperfect feedback system that is electoral democracy.
I mention this obvious point because of a less obvious consequence. Presidential elections do not ever have the effect of “sending a message.” Their unique purpose is to determine who will be in power:
-For the next four years, who will nominate people for the Supreme Court? Who will staff the next ranks of district judges and appeals-court judges in the federal judiciary? Who will represent the United States overseas? Who will make the judgment calls—about war and peace, about doing more and doing less, about this emphasis versus that—that make up the job of the presidency? Who will be the counterpart, in a good way, of John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Or the counterpart, in a bad way, of G.W. Bush in the rush to invading Iraq after the 9/11 attacks?
The ripple effects of which party holds power are clear during a president’s years in office, but they last much longer. The six-vote members of the GOP’s current Supreme Court super-majority were all nurtured as youngsters in previous GOP administrations. (Three of them—Roberts, Kavanaugh, Barrett—were members of the GW Bush legal team during the 2000 Florida-recount wars. If we saw this pattern in any other country…) Most members of Joe Biden’s cabinet were in previous positions during Bill Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s administrations. Holding power matters now, and it will matter later on.
That’s the choice, and the only choice, voters can influence every presidential-election day.
On the other 1460 days of a four-year cycle, they—we—can “send messages.” We can do so by: Voting in primaries. Making donations. Withholding donations. Organizing. Protesting. Petitioning. Running for office. Switching support. Turning against an ally who is not supportive enough. Turning toward an ally who is. Generally being a burr under the saddle. This is how civic society works. And what it is over-represented in polls that are months or years ahead of election day. (That is, people complaining about an incumbent who isn’t fully in line with their movement’s goals, even though in the end they will probably vote for him or her.)
But for presidential elections, “messages” don’t matter. Putting people in power does. Barring the unforeseeable, this fall Joe Biden will get another term—or Donald Trump will. Those are the options. You can moralize and criticize and protest on all the other 1460 days. But on November 5, by the structural logic of American politics, voters will make an either/or choice. If you don’t vote for one, you are effectively voting for the other. Thinking anything else is a fantasy.