With Jimmy Carter apparently nearing death, a number of conservatives have taken to their word processors to declare that his 1979 "malaise" speech was pretty good after all. But, like David French, they say it was wrong then but right now:
Carter was wrong. There wasn’t a crisis of confidence. There was no malaise. There was instead a failure of leadership. Better, or at least luckier, leaders revived a broken nation.
Yet with every passing year, the deeper truths of Carter’s speech become more apparent. His insights become more salient. A speech that couldn’t precisely diagnose the maladies of 1979 more accurately describes the challenges of 2023. The trends he saw emerging two generations ago now bear their poisonous fruit in our body politic.
See also Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal today.
This is a great example of the way that knowledge of history warps our understanding of . . . history. Time has passed since the Carter era, so it's now obvious that a low point in our past was just a passing storm. Things may or may not have been as bad as we thought at the time, but it's clear that none of it spelled an irreversible decline in the stature of the United States.
Today we're experiencing the same phenomenon but without the passage of time. So once again—as it did at the time—Carter's speech seems prescient. Democracy is doomed. America is doomed. Race relations are doomed. Carter called it, but four decades too early.
I doubt this is any more true today than it was in 1979. Less true, in fact. After all, the late 1970s really did feature stratospheric inflation, an oil shock, busing wars, a hostage crisis, a punitive Fed, and, shortly, a massive recession. Practically every one of those things—along with nearly everything else—is better today than it was in Carter's time.
But in the face of a huge set of positive trends, we're all determined to focus instead on the smallish number of things going wrong. Here's an example that just happens to be close to mind. Yesterday I noted that trends among teens were quite positive along a large number of measures. This came from the CDC's YRBSS data, but here's how the CDC itself presented it:
In fact, the news is good on every single one of these measures except for the last one. But why shouldn't teen mental health be in trouble if they're constantly being bombarded with information designed to scare the hell out of them?
The same thing is true more broadly. Local news is stuffed with reports about dangers to ourselves and our kids. Fox News specializes in doomsaying and fearmongering. Politicians of all stripes are (apparently) motivated to insist that everything is terrible even when a plain look at the data shows that it's not so.
So we're afraid to let our kids walk alone in the neighborhood. We're afraid they're being taught to hate America in our schools. We're afraid they're abusing drugs and bullying each other into suicide. We're afraid that Social Security is going broke and Millennials are doomed to McJobs forever and the social safety net is all but tattered and lying in shreds. We're afraid that trans people are corrupting our youth and woke ideology is making us weak. We're afraid that cops are killing Black people in growing numbers. We're afraid that social media is destroying our sense of community. We're afraid that illegal immigrants are pouring across the border and taking our jobs. Hell, we're afraid to report good news for fear of being mobbed by people who insist that we're erasing the experiences of people who aren't doing so well.
And above all, we're terrified of what the other party will do if it ever gets power.
But in reality, we keep rolling along no matter who's in charge:
Even the booms and busts are small if you look at long-term trends. We just keep growing and growing at the same exact rate, with only modest deviations for a few years here and there.
The truth is that most things are fine—and getting better. As they say in Dune, fear is the mind killer. Or, if you prefer something less fictional, all we have to fear is fear itself.
As it happens, I've never liked that FDR line because there are things to fear aside from fear itself. Still, there's little question that overall societal fear of practically everything far exceeds the actual danger posed by most of the things we're afraid of.¹ But we're addicted to fear these days, and plenty of people have learned that they can make money off of it. The fear-industrial complex has us in its grasp and has no intention of ever letting go.
¹Climate change is the biggest exception.
1) You left out Skylab falling out of the sky and Three Mile Island. After a rough decade with a president resigning, high inflation, civil unrest and two oil shocks, it was easy to believe we were in the end days.
2) Please, don't look at GDP/capita. That only places an upper limit on resources available per individual. It says very little about the resources each individual actually commands. Try using median worker or household income instead.
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This entirely depends on the ability of current societies to respond to threats. Has something structurally changed? Does Fox News matter in the bigger picture? You seem intent on warning us about the threat of Fox News' influence, yet, seemingly downplay its effect, here?
Fear is a bad reaction even to things that are properly fear-inducing. If you should be afraid of it, odds are your rational brain has a better solution/escape.
So FDR was right.
In the case of economic depression, fear was a self-fulfilling prophesy. Incomes were down because no one was spending what they had; spending was down because people worried about their future income.
Today, we express our fear with violent rage and hatred of folks not in "our tribe." Loading up on guns and ammunition is another fear symptom, which makes the rages even more dangerous.
Fear motivates the rational brain to figure out what to do about the cause of the fear. Panic is a bad reaction because it bypasses rationality.
Remember that motivation of any sort is essentially emotional or instinctive. Even the survival drive is irrational. A purely rational mind would be an inactive mind.
In my opinion, Kevin nailed it.
Now, on to cat blogging to lift the spirits…
"we keep rolling along"
I think Kevin is right in many respects. The political and social dissatisfaction and unrest is largely a result of a deliberate Republican strategy of fostering resentment about threatened loss of White Christian Supremacy. Some leftists have responded with their own demands for conformity, and the media are always going to play up conflicts.
But to say that thing are going well economically for the majority in the country is a gross distortion. While GDP has continued to grow steadily, the increase has gone to those already wealthy, not to wage-earners:
https://skeptometrics.org/BLS_B8_Min_Pov.png
This increasing inequality is actually something that could use a lot more attention. Republicans have succeed in distracting lower-income Whites from this, or convincing them that the "coastal elites" who are benefiting are liberals, not mostly Republicans. The MSM, which have a center-right or corporatist bias, generally pay little attention to the still-growing inequality. Many Democratic politicians get too much support from the "elite" corporate interests to push economic policies that change the economic trajectory.
I'm typically the glass half full guy, but I looked up median household income in 1980, and corrected for inflation, and it was 76,800. Today's median household income is all of 78,800.
So, all that GDP is going somewhere, and it isn't to your typical household.
Caveat -- households are probably smaller and older today than in 1980. A better thing to look at would be median income of prime age workers.
Climate change is NOT the exception. It is the worst example.
https://www.mattball.org/2023/02/greta-thunbergs-misery-is-result-of.html
I worry that our current national emotional state (which also exists in other rich countries), will make improvement on important measures even more difficult.
Climate change, for example, will require a lot of investment to combat. Investment requires some positivity and hope for the future.
Then again, being fatalistic isn't new. I remember how many people were convinced back in the 1990s that things were actually so awful that we were clearly in "the end times." The Left Behind series didn't come out of nowhere. Yet young people today see the 90s as some sort of halcyon days, when college cost pennies, every one could easily afford housing, and no one had a care in the world.
Our mental health/emotional state, individually or collectively, is not about the conditions of our current experience. It is about our anticipation/expectation for the future. (It works like the stock market in that way.) The most depressing news I recall in recent years was the election of Trump. My depression began to lift before he took office, when I realized he was less likely to be the next Hitler (there was no shortage of news takes like that) and more likely to be the next "disjunctive president" (per the political theory of Stephen Skowrenek) and the end of the prevailing Republican regime. We still had four years of Trump ahead, but there was also some reason for optimism.
I remember a conversation with my mom, after my dad had died, talking about what it was like for her during the time my dad was overseas fighting in WWII. We figured it must have been excruciatingly difficult not knowing if her husband would be coming home alive, if Hitler would conquer Europe, etc. She said she and the people she knew were optimistic. They went about living their lives with the faith that everything would work out, and if it didn't, they'd deal with it then.
People these days are hardly so sanguine.
Where did things change? Hard to say for sure, but whether media is an influence on, or reflection of, the prevailing mood, the charts at the link below tell some of the story. Fig. 9 shows the average tone of news content in the NY Times. It went went from strongly positive to strongly negative in the period from 1963 to 1973, and it hasn't ever recovered (it ends in 2005, but it's doubtful anything since has reversed the decline). Fig. 10 shows a steady decline in the tone of world news broadcasts from 1979 to 2010.
https://firstmonday.org/article/view/3663/3040
How much does news media matter? A lot, I think. Especially now. It had less impact before the days of the internet & social media ... before 24-hour cable channels ... before TV news.
My mom's emotional health during WWII may not have held up so well if every twist and turn in the war were covered with same breathless coverage that today's news merchants bring to every story, even the most mundane. (Her average day then was filled far less news about a very important war than today's viewers get about absolutely inconsequential stories like the f'ing Alex Murdaugh trial. Wall-to-wall coverage on three networks? What would people in the '40s think about that?)
People who don't watch the stock market all day long tend to be happier and better-performing investors. People who can unplug from news media and social media for most of the day also tend to be happier and more well-adjusted.
Other people have said similar, but GDP per capita is a terrible way to look at how well regular people are doing. A kingdom in which the monarch owns everything and has 10,000 serfs entirely dependent on him for sustenance might have a GDP per capita of $100,000+... but all that means is the king is living a pretty awesome lifestyle, and is kicking enough scraps to the serfs to keep them alive. GDP/capita was high for a lot of Southern plantations back in the day, but it doesn't mean that the average person living on the plantation was doing well in any regard.
No, it is not. not a terrible way.
Like any statistic or point number it has limitations so one needs to combine it with another metric to qualify - as regardless of the Serf example, so long as there is not a significant inter-period change in resource distribution, an increase in wealth will generally mean an increase of wealth even if unequal.
Of course one could present a complex graphic of inequality cross mapped with GDP per capita but the added complexity won't change the fundamental observation.
And Drum is quite right.
"so long as there is not a significant inter-period change in resource distribution"
But there has been a major change in resource distribution since around 1973, and to ignore this is criminal. See the link in my comment above. There is absolutely no doubt about this - it has been documented in many ways. Kevin occasionally refers to it, but ignores it more often, as in this post.
GDP per capita is not, BY ITSELF, a good measure of how regular people are doing. You need to combine it with, for instance, the GINI coefficient. The GINI coefficient is also not helpful by itself. A low level of inequality may mean universal wealth, or universal poverty. A low level of inequality combined with high GDP per capita describes a society with an overall high standard of living.
Do you know why you don't move, are frozen, can't act?
No, it's not fear, we're all afraid.
It's because deep down you hope. You hope you'll live forever, be comfortable, never suffer. And that freezes you, shrinks you, stifles your action. And the sooner you realize that hope is misplaced, you'll move forward and live.
Paraphrased from Band of Brothers.
If there's no hope, there's no reason to act at all.
I never said no hope, I said misplaced hope. That's a very big difference.
(snort) I heard President Carter's speech in real time, and agreed with it. It was smart and well done. So when the talking heads and self-proclaimed pundits started raging about "malaise" and how very wrong the President was, it seemed uncalled for, a misinterpretation, and just more of the east coastal snootiness and Carter hatred that had followed his whole national political career.
Totally agree.
Most of the Carter-bashing recently comes from people who don't want you thinking about how bad Bush and Trump were.
Greater comfort leads to a certain degree of inclination to Drama Llama-ism.
Baseless fear is not a new phenomenon. Two generations lived in terror that those awful Reds were preparing to nuke the West. Commies were everywhere. Irrational fear of them launched the US and a few of its gormless allies on a war in Vietnam which makes the invasion of Iraq look like a triumph of sensible risk assessment. There have been other outbreaks of baseless fear about Catholics, Jews and gay men (at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic).
Politicians throughout history have used fear to whip up support from the citizenry, whether it be Carthago delenda est! or Hitler's claims that everyone was out to get Germany. Today's Republicans are simply following a well-worn playbook.
Bless you, Kevin. You are pretty much the lone voice who tells us what things are OK and points out how threadbare most of the media doomsaying really is. And that takes me to my hobbyhorse: the reason everyone insists everything is terrible is the goddamn media! I am not talking about just Fox News and other partisan media, which are awful, but the conflict-addicted mainstream news outlets.
We never hear about anything that's going well -- ESPECIALLY if it's due to government action.
For me, anyway, it comes down to this.
“I used to think that we lived in a society, and I thought that people would come together to take care of one another, and I don’t think that anymore.”
I stole that quote from another context, but it applies to this alleged malaise. It’s not fear or malaise… it’s resignation.
Poor young Jack wasn’t afraid… but he should have been.
BATTLE CREEK, Mich. — A 14-year-old boy was arraigned Friday in Calhoun County District Court, accused of shooting and killing of a 17-year-old Battle Creek Central High School student.
https://wwmt.com/news/local/jack-snyder-battle-creek-shooting-killing-central-high-school-teenager-police-department-arrest-memorial-arraigned-charged#
Let’s just agree that this one isolated incident has no effect on anyone. It’s normal and reasonable for some 13 and 14 year old boys to be armed and out and about on a cold night. It’s normal for them to rob and kill for fun. Nothing to see here.
I have just chanced upon a saying of Fred Allen: the average man has his back against an imaginary wall.
Slava Ukraini!
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/11aztbb/on_the_first_anniversary_of_russias_invasion_of/
GDP is a poor statistic to use to make the case that everything is fine and rolling along.
GDP is a useful statistic, but grossly overused as the be all statistic for life and well being.
We all know that it doesnt attempt to measure how we are all doing and it should never be used to assess whether or not we should be worried or fearful. This is true even of economic related fears.
But we're addicted to fear these days, and plenty of people have learned that they can make money off of it
And win votes.
My "theory of everything" with regard to US politics is more or less along these lines:
1) Due to complex factors (probably going back to the country's libertarian-tinged founding and the resulting worship of the Invisible Hand —any guesses as to when Adam Smith published his masterpiece?) and also including the lengthy operation of chattel slavery, the United States suffers from more economic inequality, at least post tax-transfer, than is the norm for rich countries.
2) Parliamentary systems are peerless channelers of the electorate's will. The Madisonian system? Not so much. This partly explains why the US does less redistribution, and why there is more inequality (#1 and #2 are intimately related, needless to say: libertarianism is a big part of the reason we adopted our current constitution in the first place).
3) The Depression and WW2 temporarily shook things up, but we've gradually—and since 1980 more rapidly—been getting back to our laissez-faire roots. That means growing inequality. And that means a growing feeling of vulnerability for millions of Americans.
4) "Fear" in the societal, big picture sense is hardly unknown in other high income polities, but it does tend to be more effective as a political tool in societies where there's more inequality. So it works better in the US (or Britain) than in Denmark or New Zealand.
5) Once fear gets entrenched, a societal-political feedback loop can come into play: more fear means politicians take advantage of the existing landscape, by exploiting fear. This results in political wins, and so the politicians try to gin up fear even more. Rinse and repeat.
The US is now on about its 78th rinse.
Some of us are even filled with fear that an increasingly right-wing Supreme Court might overturn Roe v Wade. Oh wait.... That actually happened.
It shows why some of the fears that Kevin dismisses as silly may be justified and why voting out of fear may be rational.
"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times"
Carter's speech was actually prescient, at least as far as the threat to democracy is concerned. When in the 1970's was there any equivalent to brainlessness of the current Republican House of Representatives?
They actually removed a President back then, for crimes far less than those committed by Trump. Can you imagine the majority of the Republican Party back then condoning the attempted coup of Jan 6?
GDP figures are a very suspect gauge of malaise. In addition to the threat to democracy, they mask growing inequality, as at least one post above recognizes. They mask declines in freedom in this post-Roe world.
Kevin is right about certain things, but I distrust his over-reliance on Panglossian charts to obscure that which is right before our eyes. Or maybe he is just trying to stir up controversy.
I tried to find charts of German GDP before WW2. Failed. But I did find this:
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/de-drittes-reich-economy.htm
"Hitler achieved notable economic and diplomatic successes during the first five years of his rule. Hitler substantially revived the economy. Unemployment, so pivotal in bringing him to power, had dropped from 6 million to less than 1 million between 1933 and 1937, this at a time when the US was still wallowing in the Depression. National production and income doubled during the same period. This was partly owing to Hitler's rearmament policy, but also to more benign forms of public spending. The world's first major highway system, the autobahns, began snaking across the country, and there was talk of providing every citizen with a cheap, standardized car, the people's car, or Volkswagen.
Nazism took root in the world's most powerful scientific culture, boasting half of the world's Nobel Prizes and a sizable fraction of the world's patents. German science and medicine were the envy of the world, and it was to Germany — the "land of scholars and poets" — that many academic hopefuls flocked to cut their scientific teeth."
So, my point is, that economic measures in that country at that time had absolutely no bearing on the rot underneath.
Say, maybe Kevin can find the charts that I couldn't?
The claims about Hitler and the economy need to be dramatically tempered. The turnaround (in terms of "was lifestyle in 1939 very much improved over 1933") was extremely limited. For example, to latch onto the two concrete values given in the quote
- 2400 miles of autobahn were constructed by 1941, 1900 in 1938
- a number of people (I forget exactly) signed up for a Volkswagen and put down some money, but not one was delivered to a civilian before the war ended.
So whatever your point was, I think the more correct point is that Nazi claims about the economy were as dodgy as their claims about other things. The fact that the rest of the world continues to lap up these claims, well, why should that be???
Adam Tooze' _The Wage of Destruction_ is the definitive book on this subject and fascinating in many many ways.
So, my point is, that economic measures in that country at that time had absolutely no bearing on the rot underneath
I think this is 100% wrong, at least based on the example you've chosen. It's true that Hilter ran a highly successful program of Keynesian economics. This has long been common knowledge. However, what swept the Nazis into power was a lascerating downturn: Germany's depression rivaled that of the United States in severity.
But sure, once he took power, Hitler appointed a competetent economics team.
This thread on AskHistorians pretty fully answers the questions about the German economy under Naziism,
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/muqeh5/is_there_any_truth_behind_the_affirmation_that/
It's an urban legend built on horseshit and propaganda and the deep need of conservatives to say something nice about Hitler.
America is multiple populations. The population that controls "public" discourse is a small fraction of that. That particular population may, in fact, be doing badly (at least relative to their expectations) and they're certainly [and justifiably!] the subject of a lot more contempt and a lot less respect than say 100 years ago.
In the usual human fashion ("No-one I know voted for Nixon/Trump", "fly-over country") it's then easy for this small fraction of America to insist that their experiences represent the totality of the American experience...
There are certainly known cases of this in other areas. For example, if you poll a large number of Americans you will learn that
- very few of them are much impressed by fame/celebrity, or want to be famous AND
- they believe that they are unusual in this, that most Americans love everything about celebrity and want to become celebrities.
Why would they be so deluded about their countrymen/ Could it possibly be that the sorts of people who create the media around celebrity are in fact a few fame-blinded half-wits who are able to fool the rest of us into assuming that their delusions represent the whole country?
"For example, if you poll a large number of Americans you will learn that
- very few of them are much impressed by fame/celebrity"
Since I don't have the ability to poll a large number of Americans, it would be interesting to have a reference to how you know that. And even if they said that, should we believe them?
To me, this does not ring true. If Trump did not have celebrity, which he cultivated extensively, he would not have gotten to first base.
"So whatever your point was"? I'm sorry that you have difficulty understanding it, but it is that economic factors such as GDP alone are a very flawed measure of a nation's health. Economic vigor has a very uncertain correlation with national health and moral decency. Perhaps even a negative one. For example, with economic growth comes increasing material pollution. Should global warming due to the increased production of greenhouse gases not be viewed as a result of increasing GDP?
The book _Collective Illusions_ by Todd Rose discusses this example along with many others.
And your willingness to dismiss the point because you have a vision of how America works and, god damn it, you're not going to let pesky facts and analysis change that, is kinda my point.
Yes Trump won, and Trump was a celebrity. So what? Biden won and Biden was not a celebrity. Trump did not BECOME a celebrity to win (or are you claiming that he had this all mapped out starting in the 1980s?)
Most people are not celebrities and most people are also not interested in running for office. I fail to see how Trump has anything to do with the claim that most people are not impressed by the celebrity lifestyle and don't want it for themselves or their families.
ACTUALLY
(a) MOST of what determines who wins is appearance. This has been shown time and again. Height is part of it (and well known) but face is also part of, though less well known.
(b) The first part of winning is simply wanting to run. The sort of (frankly pathological) personality traits that lead one to want to become a celebrity are mostly the same as those that lead one to want to become President.
So it's not especially surprising that at this highest level (President, Governor) celebrities are probably over-represented. They are self-selected as being in the (very small) group that wants to run AND they possess most of what determines whether people want to vote for them...
Both of these are very different from asserting that most people want to live the celebrity lifestyle.
References for voting being based mostly on appearance can be found in
_Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us_ by Brian Klaas.