A few days ago Damon Linker wrote a piece for the New York Times claiming that America is broken, and this is why people are so unhappy right now.
Linker makes his case by cherry picking a laundry list of bad things that have happened recently, and he's certainly right about some of them. Iraq was a disaster and the 2008 banking crisis exposed some deep problems in our financial system. On the other hand, I don't think he's right that our response to COVID-19 was shambolic or that our withdrawal from Afghanistan was humiliating. And he's flat wrong about homelessness: it's declined over the past decade.
And I can make my own list. Wages are up, unemployment is down, inflation has subsided, GDP is the best in the world, crime is declining, teen pregnancy is down, the uninsured population is down, we created a COVID vaccine from scratch in only ten months, vacation travel is skyrocketing, and everyone loves playing pickleball.
Nor is Linker right to say that we've failed to even respond to our failures. We passed a huge financial reform bill after the financial crisis. We've withdrawn from Iraq and been cautious about committing troops to other wars ever since. The Fed responded to inflation and Congress kept people solvent during the pandemic. Obamacare has addressed the health care crisis. A thousand people have been tried and convicted of the January 6 insurrection and Donald Trump will soon be one of them.
But put that all aside. We can agree to disagree. Because none of this matters unless people are, in fact, deeply unhappy these days. Our old friend YouGov asks about this every week and tells us this:
Over the past four years, reported satisfaction has gone up, happiness has gone up, and sadness has gone down. In addition, boredom, stress, frustration, and loneliness are also down.
Every four years someone tells us that this time people are really fed up with Washington. Maybe so. It's certainly true that people are increasingly unhappy with politics. It's also true that both the far right and far left are united in a sense of catastrophism. But there's not really a lot of evidence that this has changed voting patterns in the middle, and there's definitely no evidence that people overall are less happy or less satisfied with their lives than they've ever been. What does it take to pound that message home?
People writing about how bad things are have an agenda. They are not interested in facts. Just pushing their propaganda.
Not necessarily an agenda - negativity gets clicks.
Their agenda may be "get clicks".
"Area Libertarian Unhappy - Liberal Political Policies Working, Popular" is, for whatever reason, not a headline you're likely to see outside The Onion, no matter how accurate it may be.
Poor Linker, there's a competent politician in power and his team is so dysfunctional people can't even pretend, and the contrast is scary for him.
Thinking about how Trump represents a threat to liberal democracy, whenever we compare Biden and Trump on policy, aren't we creating a false equivalence?
Therefore, I propose that whenever tackling Trump's policy positions, it must be initially stated that, it won't matter what position Trump takes because when he wins, liberal democracy dies.
Likewise, when addressing topics such as satisfaction, it must first be noted that, when Trump wins, liberal democracy dies , so your satisfaction is irrelevant.
This is really needed.
Currently, people that don't pay close attention can get the impression from the media that the difference between Trump and Biden is in some policy positions. That voting for Trump is voting for terminating democracy is clear only to people that are politically engaged.
Is is a dumb list. He asks about what are we doing to resolve the various crisis of his imagination but some items in the list are the “doings”. Getting out of Afghanistan is a “doing” (and I agree, we probably got out in the only possible manner). Raisin rates, though over done, is a “doing” over inflation. What are we doing about columnists who cannot even have a semblance of consistency in just one column.
Dog bites man = not news, man bites dog = news. Things are okay = not news, things really suck = (fake) news.
I read the Linker piece the other day and two items stuck out:
Linker here is criticizing the man that the country elected to head our federal government for trying to use the federal government to improve the lives of the people in the country. That's exactly what the president is supposed to do! What is Linker's problem? Not to mention, Biden (more than any other recent president) gets shit done.
Stop with the optimism already! says the man who lectures on political science at an Ivy League university. He might be smart enough for Penn but I'm sure Democrats are also smart enough not to let him get within ten miles of any political campaign. He'd be a disaster.
I think Linker makes some good points - certainly this hasn't been the "American Century" so far, that's for sure and people have responded to this. But the idea that Biden can solve his poll rating problems by being more gloomy, is just, I mean would anyone other than Linker recommend something like this?
Leaders are supposed to be upbeat, even in the face of long odds and tough challenges ahead of them. Yes, you want the truth but you also want a path forward to overcoming said challenges. I believe it was Reagan who said "There are no easy answers to our problems but there are answers." To say things are too tough or too complex to figures out is just an abdication of leadership and luckily Biden has not gone down that road.
> What does it take to pound that message home?
The problem is that Republicans have taken to heart the Batshit Crazy brand. Perching us at the edge of becoming a fascist dictatorship is a problem, even if we continue to barely avoid falling over the edge. I don't see how even the Republicans can be happy about that branding. Fixing that one problem would go a long way toward improving the messaging.
I don't think 20 years ago a piece of shit like Trump would have a chance of becoming a president. So something did change, even though these surveys don't show it.
The basic economic situation is about the same as it has been since around 2010, which is slow improvement. We are still in the expansion phase of the economic cycle. Look at almost any macroeconomic parameter such as GDP or total employment. The pandemic interrupted things but we have gotten back on track remarkably quickly. So it is nonsense for people to complain that things are worse than they were during even the first three years of the Trump administration. The economic path through this recovery phase has gone on through the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations - Presidents don't control the economy. Biden has done some things that improved social welfare and some that may have important effects in the future, but the latter have not had much effect yet.
What might make a rational person pessimistic is that sooner or later the expansion phase will end. Banks or Wall Street will go too far, there will be some kind of a financial crash and things will go downhill for a while, as they did 2008-2010. Of course since there are essentially no rational persons when it comes to economics, this is not what people are worried about. The current alleged pessimism is primarily an expression of partisanship. Republicans are not in control, so the economy must be bad and everything that Biden does must be bad. The idea that typical white red-state voters are worse of than they were in the Trump administration is laughable, but this is how they respond in polls. This is different from how it was a couple of decades ago because partisanship has intensified, and partisanship has intensified because of culture wars, not because of any real economic views of the general population. Media pundits and reporters keep trying find anything other than racism and religious bigotry to explain Trump's support but it doesn't work.
Apparently people are now programmed to answer any question about economics in a partisan manner. They may not make that connection when asked about their own happiness - or maybe people just always say they are happy whatever is actually going on.
Actually when asked about their own economic situation most people say they're OK. Likewise their local economy is OK. It's the national economy which Republicans say is terrible - because that's Biden's fault. Krugman has been citing these poll results in his columns and Kevin may have mentioned them before.
Drum: "And he's flat wrong about homelessness: it's declined over the past decade."
Linker wrote: "surging rates of homelessness and the spread of tent encampments in American cities."
Linker is correct about American cities, which is what he clearly stated.
But people are happiest when they are griping...
" everyone loves playing pickleball."
Speak for yourself, brahmachari.
I think what's getting missed is a sense of precariousness and tension. Things might be okay now, but I don't know that anyone is confident that things will stay okay. Between regressive Republican policies (and Trump's potential return to power), the quickening march of climate change, and the eye-watering wealth inequality, it really just feels like we're on the precipice of bad times.
And most people likely have 1 or 2 bad things going on in their life that cast a long shadow over everything else, even if everything else is largely peachy. My wife and I are in decent financial straits, but my wife also has a chronic hormonal disorder (endometriosis) that means she's in chronic pain, anywhere from low level to excruciating, most days. It's also left her infertile, and our two rounds of IVF (which we could only afford thanks to a loan from my boomer parents, and which could end up illegal) failed horribly. It's hard feeling particularly optimistic, even when our material situation is pretty good, when she's in pain all the time and we're pushing middle age with no children for reasons completely out of our control.