The job of talking heads is entertainment, not any practical value. I'd say the same is mostly true for the news media at large, as well as bloggers, commentators, humanities theorists, and other professional thinkers.
Most of the writers for the Atlanic are dead wrong (hell most op-eds are regardless of source) but David Brooks is a "conservative" by liberal standards so people on HN and Twitter love to call him out more than their progressive talking head darlings.
The editor of The Atlantic has questionable ethics (he was a military prison guard while he served in a foreign army that's been accused of war crimes) so I always look at The Atlantic with a jaundiced eye.
As for Brooks, he defended the invasion of Iraq for years.
The "foreign army that's been accused of war crimes" is the Israel Defense Forces. Jeffrey Goldberg appears to have written a book about some aspects of his time as a prison guard at Ktzi'ot Prison: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/139269.Prisoners
I find these sorts of discussions unproductive in the absence of some specific focal points. Discussing how well the US is doing overall is sort of meaningless because it's so heterogeneous; you could have serious problems even while overall the country is doing well by historical standards.
Saying things are fine by the standards of the 1940s isn't helpful either; I'm not sure that's ever really been an appropriate yardstick (I think public health and wellness opportunity costs are often more relevant). I also think you can take many of these same sorts of arguments, go back in time, and find out that many positive indicators preceded very horrific periods in world history. For instance, there were a lot of societal advancements that coincided with the emergence of the world wars, and they still happened despite (or maybe even because) of those advancements.
I also have come to believe that many forms of societal collapse or crisis emerge fairly rapidly; things seem good by many objective indicators until they really don't. If you track some of these public indicators, they often seem to covary relatively weakly with the sorts of things you might expect, and no one really understands why. Seen from a distanced perspective those indicators don't seem to work as measures of what you'd like them to.
I'm not trying to adopt a pessimistic position, as I tend to think a lot of that is equally poorly posed, and I think the article is correct that if you look to history simply for benchmarks of what to expect when something bad happens, things aren't as catastrophic as you'd think. But in the absence of some kind of rigorous understanding of what to look to for societal collapse or catastrophe, these kinds of discussions in either direction are kind of pointless. What seems more relevant are more focal discussions of specific issues, or how to predict what is important.
Fast processes driven by chaos exist in nature everywhere. There's no reason to think you are even being pessimistic as much as you are being realistic.
- GDP gains might reflect an overall loss to society, as the previously untracked work (homemaking) was more valuable than the GDP-tracked work that replaced it… and families are doing substantially worse just to survive
- GDP per capita might not reflect that 99% of society is doing worse as we experience de-industrialization and destruction of our communities because paper gains like ownership stakes in foreign companies and hyper inflated real estate “mask” the losses experienced by most people
I’m curious what US metrics look like if you exclude the top… 5% over the past 50 years. What has life been like for 19 out of 20 people?
If you want a book length answer to that question, Factfulness by Hans Rosling might be a good place to start.
It shows all the ways that life has actually improved in the last 100 years across the world, for all people.
There’s a reason that populations have risen sharply to all time highs during this period. Infant and maternal mortality have reduced, deaths from deadly diseases have reduced through proliferation of antibiotics and vaccines, people don’t die of starvation from famine anymore in most of the world.
And you can actually see the effect of all of these things. When people are secure that their children will live to see adulthood, they drop from having 5-6 children to 1-2.
Things aren’t perfect, but on that one heartbreaking metric - the % of parents who mourn the loss of a child - the progress is phenomenal.
And that’s just one thing. I could give as many examples as you’d like, some of which might resonate more than others. Here are two more.
- the existence of the internet, smartphones and software powering those phones. We can stay in touch with nearly anyone we want to. We can find communities of like minded people online. It’s safe to say there are many on HN who fit right in but might not fit in their physical neighbourhoods. Companionship and community are critical to our well being.
- conscription is at an all time low. You, reading this, probably will never have to do military service or die for your country. Even many nations that do require service, like Finland, Singapore and South Korea have been at peace for a long, long time. Not dying in wars started by others is fantastic.
- we have access to wider variety of foods - both ingredients and cuisines. Variety that previous generations could only have dreamed of.
- we’ve never had more or better entertainment options. There are more movies, books, TV shows and video games than ever. Even if you felt they were better in the old days, you can enjoy all the entertainment from the old days on your smartphone for the cost of a cheap subscription.
Life isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better than it used to be. This idea that life sucks because billionaires exist is a sad, small minded philosophy.
I have "1-2" children in part because the costs have skyrocketed and also because the nanny state says I go to jail if my kid say walks alone to the playground, so there is no time to micromanage more than 1 or 2 people to the extent they can't even walk without supervision. If you read about "child abuse stories" where some evil villan allowed the kids to play outside it is almost invariably someone with 3+ children (and usually a single mom) because with that many kids it's impractical and possibly even impossible to follow the every wish and demand of every asshole with a cellphone in their hand and ready to call CPS at the drop of a hat.
You're kinda proving my point here. People will always focus on what they don't have, rather than what they do. You will likely never experience losing a child, something that was part of the human experience for all time, until the last 50 or so years. And yet, rather than enjoy that enormous privilege, you complain about the cost of child care.
I don't blame you. You're acting exactly how most people act in most situations. Dwelling on what they don't have and getting angry about it.
Even if you won the lottery and could afford to have 20 kids and a nanny for each one you still wouldn't be happy. Not because you're bad, but because that's how brain chemistry works. The hundreds of millions from the lottery starts to feel "normal" and you'd be complaining about something else. Like your yacht not being big enough or whatever.
Ultimately the thing that is keeping you unhappy isn't the childcare cost or the spectre of CPS. You're unhappy because it's inherent in the human condition.
This idea that life sucks because billionaires exist is a sad, small minded philosophy.
It certainly would be. So I think you should consider why else people say what they say.
People are more sensitive to changes, especially negative ones, rather than absolutes. It doesn't matter how many things are good. If things are wrong, they need to improve, and anything that impedes improvement is perceived as negative. If things get worse, that is a big negative score -- especially if somebody says "Hey, it was worse in the past, so be happy that it's not that bad".
A number of things appear to be getting worse now, and a number of it has to do with the very wealthy:
* We just had four years of a Presidency who was very intent on antagonizing his opponents. He is wealthy, and was supported by the party that appealed to the wealthy.
* Even with him (temporarily) out of office, the impulse that put him there is still present. Those same smartphones bring us a constant stream of people who intend to aggravate -- not just bad news, but people who want them to be unhappy.
* Some of that is driven by wealthy people who profit off that unhappiness. It drives engagement, and they sell attention.
* A lot of people feel that their rights are decreasing. Sometimes it's literally true; sometimes it's merely a threat; sometimes it's engagement as in the last point. It doesn't matter, for example, that white people are in zero danger of becoming an oppressed minority; many are certain that it is, and that drives acting out in a way that is harmful.
* It is difficult to ignore a threat with high consequences and low probability. It does no good to tell people that there's a 99.9999% chance that their children won't be shot today -- especially if it's coupled with people dismissing the ones who are shot.
And so on. My point is that it is not "life sucks because billionaires", and in fact life sucks because people think that they only thing they're complaining about is "because billionaires". That means nobody is helping as things get worse, and even standing in the way.
You could make the argument that America is great because we think we suck and drive ourselves harder than might be necessary. It's when you think you're great that you become complacent.
That's an interesting dichotomy considering that, from an outsider's perspective, America seems to have a lot more "We're #1", "Greatest nation on the planet", "boo when you hear someone else's national anthem" sentiment than anything else. Maybe it's a collective overcompensation? But it doesn't seem terribly self aware.
>> Discussing how well the US is doing overall is sort of meaningless because it's so heterogeneous
Complete nonsense. Discussing what the temperature of an object is overall is meaningless, because it's made of individual atoms and molecules that do their own thing...
Fully agree with article author. US has it's fair share of problems, but if it avoids a second Trump term I think it will have a bright future in the next few dozen years.
China was a potential threat to the US global technological, industrial and military superiority, but since the 10 year change of leadership was abandoned I don't think they are a real threat anymore. Their dictator will concentrate on keeping his power and not on developing the country.
I'm no Trump fanatic, but I still do not understand what people's real problem is with him either. Most of their problems seem to be made up. You can see it most clearly in the Jan 6th committee, who were committed by any means to suggesting that Trump incited violence even though he directly and plainly called for peaceful protest and spoke against violence that day, yet they showed none of that during the "trials".
Anyone who denies the legitimacy of democratic elections is an enormous threat to the nature of democracy and should not be given large political power.
The left did that in '16 and went on a sham witch hunt for meddling Russians for 3 years until they came up with pretty much nothing. So I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Maybe.. "It's only okay when we do it"?
The conclusion was that Russia was without a doubt meddling with the election. But the conclusion was not that the election itself was fraudulent or something that we should not abide by.
Telling the masses that your political opponents used fraud to get elected is far beyond the scope of reasonable questions. Undermining the systems of government to benefit your personal power is totalitarian.
What's next, protesting the government at all is also undermining the systems of government and is totalitarian? If Trump's (or whatever figure of authority, because plenty of people have done this) claims are false, then do an audit out in the open. Suppressing the discussion through censorship is not the answer.
And aside from that - pretending fraud isn't real or is an impossibility in an American election is incredibly naive. That's like saying Chicago can't have gun violence. Elections should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly.
> Elections should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly.
Sure there's no problem with that. But that's not what Trump and his team did.
Trump claimed there was fraud so loudly not because he wanted to find actual fraud (which he had no reason to believe existed), but because he wanted people to be very concerned with the idea the election was potentially fraudulent. He wanted people to be concerned with this idea because it legitimized his true motivations - he wanted power for himself.
Trump's team didn't actually want to find fraud; no, their goal was to create an environment of suspicion about fraud, but they had absolutely no intention whatsoever to prove their case. We know this because in all of the 60+ court cases they brought, they never alleged fraud, let alone attempted to prove it. If they did, they would have revealed they had zero evidence for their claims. Of course for this reason, they lost every single case (except I think an early PA case that didn't even relate to claims of fraud).
And it needs to be said that the elections were investigated. Georgia investigated every claim made by the President, and found none of them credible. If Trump were genuinely concerned with finding fraud and simply questioning the results of the election, he would have been satisfied with their process. But the process didn't end up with him winning Georgia, so he wasn't satisfied, to the point that he threatened Georgia elections officials with prosecution when they refused to overturn his loss there.
So yes, when it comes to elections generally, they should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly. But we must also say in the same breath that we cannot let disingenuous concerns about "election integrity" actually undermine elections. That's a problem too, which has demonstrably lead to a coup attempt and violent insurrection. So I would say "voter fraud hysteria" is actually a worse problem than voter fraud itself, which is proven to be rare and hasn't caused any coups or insurrections.
> What's next, protesting the government at all is also undermining the systems of government and is totalitarian?
You'll need an industrial grade lube to get a slope that slippery.
> And aside from that - pretending fraud isn't real or is an impossibility in an American election is incredibly naive. That's like saying Chicago can't have gun violence.
Nice and a strawman too.
> Elections should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly.
Ballot counting is watched by representatives of both parties. Neutral third parties agree that systemic voter fraud is unlikely to be happening at scale, and we do try to catch the dumbasses that try to cheat on an individual scale fairly easily. We can also add a false equivalence to your rapid fire fallacies.
"Questioning" an election is not the same thing as decrying fraud and trying to convince courts to overturn the results when you have no evidence of fraud.
It's one thing to go to a court because you have evidence of fraud, and you want them to overturn the election on the basis of that evidence. That would be legal and well within the rights of litigants.
It's quite another to go to a court, not because you have evidence, but because you want to avail yourself of their power to overturn the election by making some convincing argument. Or, short of that, to use the context of a court battle to give a patina of legitimacy to otherwise baseless accusations and FUD (lawyers are great at making bullshit sound convincing in a lawsuit).
That's what the Trump team did, and those are not the kind of people we should be letting near power (those who show an eager willingness to use institutions corruptly).
That is indeed a purpose of courts. Hence why it is wrong to skip the courts and denounce everything as fraud to millions of people and encourage them to reject the democratic process before you have gone through a judicial process.
"People are losing faith in our elections guys! It's pushing people to extremist beliefs that aren't healthy for peaceful democracy. Should we do an audit to prove nothing shady is going on?"
"No, ban the vocal disbelievers from social media, and ban their candidates from participating. Or imprison them."
Denying the legitimacy election is something both parties do now. With regular frequency. There was plenty of it in the 2000 election with Bush v. Gore. Its perfectly reasonable given we do not have auditable elections.
Hasn't that improved recently with better ballot counting, fewer machines that only stores the result in hard drive somewhere instead of paper trails etc?
If it is not auditable and the source code is not open source, what would dispel fears of a fraudulent election?
Virtually every other institution has lost credibility in public opinion polls. Why should elections be any different? The losing side will always cry foul, as they have for multiple elections now: 2000, 2004, 2016 and 2020. It is tempting to look the other way, when the one you voted for happened to win.
The left did the exact same thing with Russiagate back in 2016 when Trump was first elected. It's been happening for a long time.
Dems response to this was not good in my opinion. There is obviously a large population of voters that believe that fowl play is happening in elections, instead of working to increase transparency - there are a lot of things we can do like increased auditing or coming up with a more open way to verify votes - they doubled down and are attacking those who are asking questions. These are fellow Americans, they should not be demonized, we should work to improve election integrity and openness, increase everyones' confidence in election integrity.
> Anyone who denies the legitimacy of democratic elections
Were you not alive for Bush v. Gore ? All of us on the left denied the legitimacy of that election, loudly, repeatedly, and I don't remember that being considered an "enormous threat to the nature of democracy".
The biggest thing I think is that he was vilified, to an extreme degree, by corporate media. Every step he made and every word he uttered was spun or reworked by every major news outlet (except Fox) to look like he was somehow being racist or some other thing. So most peoples' view of him when they turned on the TV or opened up their news app was just the headlines with which they were bombarded. I'm also not a Trump fanatic either, but I did realize after he left office that there was a considerable amount of spin applied to basically everything he did.
> plainly called for peaceful protest and spoke against violence that day, yet they showed none of that during the "trials".
If you believe this is what Jan 6 was about, you didn't pay attention to what the Committee found.
In fact it was an administrative coup first, which involved various state GOP parties, various GOP House Reps (Biggs, Gosar, Greene, and Jordan among them), various GOP Senators (Johnson and Cruz among them), the White House (President, Vice President, Chief of Staff, and various lawyers including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell). It was a conspiracy to commit fraud at the highest levels of the government, and the Committee lays it all out.
Trump knew he lost the election very early on, but wanted to stay in power nonetheless. He admits this to many advisors and the Jan6 committee proves this through under-oath testimony which is not hearsay. They've released the transcripts, you can read them for yourself.
John Eastman comes to him with a plan. This was the coup plot he called the "Green Bay Sweep":
- Forge state certificates of the vote electing Trump, transmit them to the VP. This is illegal.
- Have senators and house members object to real certificates of the vote electing Biden. This is legal
- Have VP toss out real certificates. He does not have the power to do this.
- These contests start a clock, that when it runs out, if a President Elect is not certified, it goes to state delegations for a majority vote. Republicans controlled the majority of state delegations at the time, so they would have installed Trump despite him losing the popular and electoral college votes.
- The next step would probably be the Democrats would sue, it would make it to SCOTUS, and SCOTUS at that point likely wouldn't have taken the case, citing separation of powers (Constitution makes clear the only way to remove POTUS is impeachment or 25th amendment. SCOTUS has no power to do so, and how would they enforce it anyway?). DOJ wouldn't prosecute anyone because it would be controlled by Trump. This would have effectively ended democracy in America.
BTW that speech in question? Why did he need everyone there on Jan6? To pressure Pence. He was the key to the whole thing, as he was tasked with overstepping his clear duties as VP at the Jan6 vote counting ceremony, and in doing so would have violated the Constitution. But in the days leading up to Jan6, Pence made clear to Trump that he was going to do the right thing, and that would have been the end of Trump's administrative coup plot. That's where the insurrection comes in.
The Jan6 committee found that Trump knew the audience were armed. He instructed his SS to stop taking their weapons. He told the audience to go to the Capitol and "fight like hell". He told them there was a massive fraud and the election was stole, and the rules are very different in those circumstances. He was preceded by his lawyer, who told the audience that a "trial by combat" was in order. He instructed them to go to the Capitol to obstruct the vote count ("stop the steal"), which was exactly what his administrative coup plot required.
And they did. They did everything Trump wanted, and he played his part by sitting back and letting it happen, instead of doing, well.... anything. Well, aside from further inciting the mob over Twitter as he watched them attack the Capitol on TV. He did do that.
It would have worked too if it wasn't for two things:
1. Pence didn't leave the Capitol.
2. McConnell/Pelosi reconvened the Senate/House and they worked through the night to certify Biden as President Elect.
If those two things hadn't happened, Trump's plan (really Eastman's) could have very well worked, and we'd be living in a very different country right now.
That is why people don't like Trump -- because he's the kind of person (an authoritarian wannabe dictator) who worked to make that happen. We were saying so the whole ...
What you're bringing up--particularly the actions of the Senators, Representatives, and lawyers--are legitimate and legal avenues to pursue if one disputes election results. Democrats have used those avenues in the past, too. Don't twist that into some grand conspiracy that coincidentally just happened to not work out at all.
> He told the audience to go to the Capitol and "fight like hell"
You're using the quoted part with the first part of your sentence to spread false information. Anybody that reads the full quote and context of the speech [2] knows he wasn't talking about fighting at the Capitol. Biden and Harris have said "fight like hell" many times, but nobody uses their quotes out of context to insinuate advocacy for some theoretical coup.
Everything the President said related to the activities at the Capitol was about keeping it peaceful.
On Jan 6, 2021, the President tweeted:
"Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!" [0]
and
"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!" [1]
In addition, at the rally prior to the protest at the Capitol, he said:
"I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard." [2]
> The Jan6 committee found that Trump knew the audience were armed.
Armed with what? Firearms? And how could he know that? Exactly zero protestors at the Capitol were found to have been carrying firearms.
> That's where the insurrection comes in.
"insurrection" | noun | a violent uprising against an authority or government
Surely an actual insurrection would have involved at least one protestor bringing at least one firearm.
> Trump knew he lost the election very early on, but wanted to stay in power nonetheless.
The whole claim that he tried to stay in power is facially absurd. He didn't try to stay in power... he willingly handed over power as evidenced by the fact that there was a peaceful transition of power.
It's fine to disapprove of Trump, but this rambling unproven conspiracy stuff the January 6th Committee did was on a whole new level. Their entire goal was to get Trump disqualified and tarnish his image, no matter where the facts actually led.
Thanks for your effort post, I'll respond in kind.
> What you're bringing up--particularly the actions of the Senators, Representatives, and lawyers--are legitimate and legal avenues to pursue if one disputes election results.
Of course legislators and lawyers enjoy certain rights. However, those rights are not without limitations. For example, it's fine for a lawyer to file a lawsuit, but it's not fine to do so frivolously or fraudulently. Doing so would incur professional consequences. And indeed, Trump's lawyers who worked with him have faced professional consequences for their roles: Giuliani has lost his right to practice law in NY [1], and Sidney Powell is currently undergoing professional review [2] which might result in the same.
> Democrats have used those avenues in the past, too.
As for legislators, it's fine for them to raise an objection about an election. They enjoy that right. They can do so for a legitimate reason, or than can do so to make a political statement, as you note Democrats have done. What they can't do is use their position to obstruct the proceeding with corrupt intent.
In order for an objection to be raised, a House Rep and Senator must both object. This happened in this case and is fine. But the reasons for their objections had already been litigated. By the 1/6 ceremony, exactly 0 claims of fraud were raised in the appropriate venue (a courtroom), so to raise them exclusively on cable news and the House floor does not evidence a good faith concern about "election integrity".
I'm not the only one who thought the role of various House members on and surrounding 1/6 was suspect; we know several of them sought pardons, and they all have yet to answer why. Why seek a pardon if you don't have consciousness of guilt?
Furthermore, while it may be the right of some state lawmakers to certify federal elections, it's not okay for them to do so in a clandestine and manner in order to transmit a fraudulent certificate of the vote to the Vice President. That happened and it's not okay.
> You're using the quoted part with the first part of your sentence to spread false information.
If we're going to take the out-of-context utterance of the word "peaceful" during a speech to be prima-facie evidence of the intent of the speaker to be peaceful, then we must also take the out-of-context utterance of the word "fight" to be evidence of intent of violence.
The context of the event was that Trump summoned those people to that place based on a lie, one he knew to be false. There was and still is no proof of any of his claims. Not a single one. To stand up there and repeat them in front of a massive crowd is to effect a fraud. He then asked them to do something very specific: march to the Capitol, and "stop the steal", which was a euphemism for obstructing the proceeding. And how did he want them to do it? Trump told them. He said that because of the fraud (for which he had no evidence) that it was fair to play by a very "different" set of rules. Different how? Well Rudy had told them just minutes before: "Trial by combat!" (he screamed to thunderous applause from the armed crowed).
Then Trump directed them to the Capitol, and combat ensued. If you read the court transcripts, defendant after defendant says they thought they were doing what Trump wanted. They thought they were acting on the orders of POTUS.
This is a pretty cut and dry cause and effect. He got people mad over a lie, told them what to do about it, and then watched it happen, as they did exactly what he wanted.
> Everything the President said related to the activities at the Capitol was about keeping it peaceful.
I notice you've left out the crucial tweet he sent during the riots, wherein he expressed displeasure at his VP's failure to follow the plan, which was met by the crowd with renewed calls for violence and death.
I find that phenomenon really weird, where things the ruling class promote or say is not immediately seen with immense suspicion if not outright immediate rejection and counter. There is simply no greater alienation and division than the difference between the ruling class and the people who do the work.
An example; the ruling class promoting unfettered immigration and “Our Democracy” does not make people at least a bit suspicious of their motivations? Billionaires pushing immigration to import cheap labor? Billionaires pushing the populace having a supposed vote?
But then again, this forum is very much a body representing ruling class agents at the very least, and it is immensely difficult for people to admit, let alone just contemplate that they are possibly not the good and great people they think themselves of. This YN forum isn’t all that different than a palace parlor where the aristocratic strata of the past who told themselves all kind of things about how they need to impose their ideas on the working class … for their own benefits, which magically happen to coincide with only advantaging the aristocracy. It’s really no differ than in the past; be it the feudal European aristocracy, the Southern aristocracy, or the technocratic modern aristocracy that is deceptive and secretive about what they need to impose on the commoners but not on themselves.
> the people who are most pessimistic about the country are not the working class but highly educated and affluent people—the people, that is, who spend more time engaging with news media.
I was surprised by this claim. I was always under the impression that poorer people spent more time consuming news media, and that the wealthier a person was, the less news they consumed. I don't know where I got such an impression, and I think I may have confused the statistics for television watching in general. Does anyone have a good source showing a correlation in either direction?
Perhaps David Brooks believes the working class get their news from Facebook memes. It's the only explanation that allows me to make his statement congruous.
Do you know any old people? My family is 24 hours Fox news, my wife's is 24 hour CNN, I can't say that either has a rosy view of where the country is going. Both would be considered well-off. Everyone else (especially the working poor) is too busy to listen to that noise.
You're only underscoring my same feeling of incongruity reading Brooks' statement. Yes, I know old people (ha ha, I'm old as well, but perhaps that's beside the point). My father has the TV on 24/7 with, I assume, FOX news playing (I wouldn't know since it's been over a decade since I chose to visit him, sadly).
I haven't had cable for over two decades now. I only catch cable news in the early morning when I'm in a Best Western lobby trying to pull a waffle out of the waffle iron.
So you agree that every country that exists today is a violent regime except the handful that gained their independence peacefully because the rest were all formed through violence?
I'm not a historian, perhaps you can enlighten me.
France is one that came to mind. Violent regime? Of course not. But they did have to tread through a reign of terror after their Révolution française.
Perhaps you eventually get to a peaceful regime. But it's hard to imagine power sweeping into control on a wave of violence suddenly shuttering that same violence.
The exception that proves the rule? That was the one that came to mind that, to my history-lacking-knowledge became peaceful right after the shooting stopped. I don't disagree.
Of course, people talking about violent means is a far cry from what those same people will actually do. Everyone has their own breaking point, but until it reaches a critical mass in enough people its not going anywhere. Where that point is is anyone's guess, but I would guess its when people feel their personal/family's liberties are under direct assault.
I suspect they end themselves. The rest of us just need to lay low.
I'm reminded of the scene in "Seven Samurai" when the villagers bring the seven samurai armor and weapons from dead samurai and Toshiro Mifune's character explodes at the peasants — always pretending to be afraid, humble, powerless, but all the while hoarding weapons, food....
Agree. North Korea is a shining example of this. They just make sure that they compensate their police and army forces slightly better than the serfs and keep their upper tiers in a state of suspended terror.
On one hand you have a brave but tragic resistance like Iran right now where dozens of young people have protested and been brutally cut down or publically executed.
On the other hand you have numerous times in history where a government has learned the phrase "Governments are supposed to fear their people". Usually fire is involved.
Both will eventually achieve their aims, but the first example is usually slower and more costly to do so.
Many conflicts start as the first type and become the second.
Hahah! New this would be by Brooks before I clicked. Strongly disagree with this entire argument. Americans work more for less than their parents did, and much of the rest of the western world.
Only if you ignore the increases in quality over time.
Yes people pay more for housing, however in 1975 the average American home was 560 Sq Ft/person in 2015 it hit 1058 Sq Ft/person. https://thefioneers.com/average-home-size/
So people are paying more for housing, they are also getting a lot more of it. Similarly people keep moving to expensive cities which shockingly have expensive housing.
Houses got bigger because they're not allowed to be small. Most cities have minimum lot sizes. Even Houston, the libertarian poster child, has a minimum lot size of, IIRC, 5000 square feet.
People move to expensive cities because that's where the jobs are. Nobody moves to Fort Bragg, even though it has practically the same climate and coastline as San Francisco, because there's no money to be made.
Handwaving these economic forces away as "quality increases" is misleading.
Not only are there minimum lot sizes, there are minimum square footage mandates in effect for much of America.
Also as a home builder once you realize how expensive the permitting process can be you're suddenly motivated to build big. The permitting doesn't scale with structure size, it is fixed in most areas.
I don't really see how square feet per person is "more". Where I live for example it's an actually a detriment as I'm taxed based off the habitable square footage. This just further increases the cost of living.
Lots of these "better" giant houses (at least in the US) waste tons of space. You can feel like you have more space in a house significantly smaller if the layout is at all thoughtful. I've owned houses with 500+ square feet that were practically unusable.
The finishes have also gotten worse, in many ways. These expensive McMansions have worse trim, doors (interior and exterior), and sometimes flooring than cheap working-class houses in the '60s and '70s. Better windows I guess. At least as far as energy efficiency goes. Better insulation. Basically if code says it has to be better, it is, and everything else is worse.
500, maybe somewhat more, that was effectively unusable. Weird transition spaces that you can't really do anything with and also lack walls to put anything against (friggin' open floorplans) eating up 100 or more square feet, a front room of perhaps 300 sqft laid out so poorly that it was hard to do much with it (and so extremely open that it defied repurposing), a master bedroom that they'd decided to make the size of an entire three-car garage (that's what was under it) because they couldn't think of anything else to do with that space, I guess, in a house where all the other bedrooms were perhaps 1/4 that size, so not some obscene mansion where all the rooms are vastly oversized. That kind of thing.
But the parent said people worked more. Maybe they didn't want bigger houses, maybe they wanted time with their families, friends, and hobbies.
Are more things really adding to our quality of life, or is that just consumerism talking?
Lots of families need multiple incomes to pay for those bigger houses, compared to 1975 [0]. And zoning regulations don't allow enough housing to be built in the cities with good job and social opportunities where people would like to live. Seems to be more optimized for investors than families and quality of life.
He said, “Americans work more for less” working more and getting more suggests some agency.
Consumerism isn’t a need. Give up the large house in an expensive area, cellphone, high tech car, computer, cable TV, etc and suddenly you can get by without working so hard just like my parents generation.
This reads just like how a con artist and manipulative person would frame things, essentially, don’t believe your own eyes and mind, let someone else with their own motivations tell you how it is instead.
It is not possible for America to be on the right track when it is not no longer on the America track. Those are mutually excluding things, like a man abducting a child having the child’s best interest in mind.
No matter what track we are on, we are clearly no longer on the American track when America is being denigrated and abused and destroyed in all aspects but the name.
Is it the right track? That’s a different question altogether, but if the person making such a statement is being deceptive and manipulative in their language, it is reasonable to assume they are also not honest in their motivations and intent, hostile even.
> Those are mutually excluding things, like a man abducting a child having the child’s best interest in mind.
This is possibly a bad example; the overwhelming majority of "kidnappings" of children are by one parent as a result of a dispute with the other parent. In that case, the "abducting" parent might well have (and almost certainly think they have) the best interests of the child in mind (never mind that the other parent and/or the state apparatus might disagree).
> People are polarizing in ways that weren't around only a few years ago.
This one gets me the worst. America's political landscape is forever changed.
1. Political discourse between sides is so aggressive that morals, the truth, etc, are trumped by 'Who cares? My team is winning.'
2. Congressional cooperation has fallen to levels where the entirety of the government is incapable of making simple, easy decisions, and even when they do, it must help a talking point.
3. This divide has spread outwards into other branches of government in such a way that breaks the entire intent of checks and balances. At this point, the Supreme court is just doing a congressional party's bidding. This seems like 'balance' to other branches but it actually limits the ability for the supreme court to make impartial choices and means that a regime change in congress/ president will fully eliminate checks and balance. The government will answer to a party's bidding rather than the constitution or people.
4. A majority of people in one party no longer trust the electoral system while a majority in the other party see signs that the game is rigged against them (Gerrymandering). This causes a general feeling of 'We lost because of X, not because of us.'
But finally, to me, the worst item...
5. Politics in America are now about feeling right and 'winning' rather than promises and goals. This was always in the background and any marketer will tell you this is how human minds work...but this change accelerates the rest. It doesn't matter what policy is passed or how it plays out, as long as 'I feel right.' Politics now realize that success is a 'sick burn' or a 'scary claim about "them"', not actual improvement of the country. Why? One of these is publicity and moves individual donations...it helps get you elected. It fires up your base because it is way easier to sell negative emotions ("I hate them", "They are going to kill america, we have to save it") rather than positive ("Our government is doing good things.")
This means you need puppets, people in your party for their party to hate and people in their party for your party to hate. Alas, you get Trump, AOC, McConnell, Pelosi, Gatez. Each party knows this agreement is fantastic, or has learned it at least. Why? Because if, say, the GOP did not have a 'them' it would be impossible to sell.
Not to sound condescending, but this reads like someone who started reading the news last week. It has absolutely always been that way. We had segregationists in the Senate 20 years ago. Backbiting and media hijinks are the thing we do now instead of assassinations. When Al Smith was the first Catholic to be nominated by a major party for the presidency, he was greeted in the south by burning crosses. This was less than 100 years ago
Of course these things happened...but 20 years ago we didn't have Social media echo chambers that amplified all of it, we didn't have your representative being on your feed daily. All the signals that enable it have been amplified.
Liberal is one of those words that is almost meaningless. It can be used almost synonymously with "progressive" at times. But it's also, when used in this context, it's more about free market capitalism, individualism, etc. Things we tend to associate more with conservatism. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism
I thought the best term is simply "neo-liberal": the progressives in power that are mostly interested in staying in power and not actual human progress.
The same term applies to neo-conservatives as well. Ideology is more a means to maintain power and less about a realistic goal.
If that's your standard for the country falling apart, then nearly the entire history of the country was a complete hellscape.
There has been a regression in abortion rights in some states, but there is still significantly better access to abortions than any time prior to the 1970s.
There has been a hint that there might be a regression in LGBT rights, but there are still far more rights than any time pre-2010.
We have entire states where abortion has been effectively outlawed. Transgender people, a tiny minority of the population have been relentlessly targeted:
> We’re back to fighting proxy wars with the Russians, which the supposedly progressive author presents as a positive!
Fighting and winning. We've managed to degrade the Russian army to the point where they are fielding tanks from the 1970's and all for less than $50 billion and 0 US casualties. If that's not a positive, I don't know what is.
The strategic argument I respect much more than the moral one.
I agree it’s working to destabilize the Russian federation. The question is: “is it worth it?”
100B+ in military spending, destroying Ukraine, dramatically weakening the European economy seems like a pretty steep price for fighting the ghost of the USSR.
In general we have a pretty terrible track record for acting as world police. Arming the Mujahideen during the Soviet-afghan war did defeat the soviets…but the aftermath was horrendous for the region.
> 100B+ in military spending, destroying Ukraine, dramatically weakening the European economy seems like a pretty steep price for fighting the ghost of the USSR.
You should keep in mind that Ukraine would be more destroyed without American and other western help, not less.
The US for the first time in a long time is supplying a side in a war that has a clear good a bad side.
Which failed and had little popular or organized military support. We've had a lot worse throughout our history. McVeigh, civil war, et cetera.
> People are polarizing in ways that weren't around only a few years ago.
But compared to the polarization of late 1800's?
> The congressional deficit has ballooned to unsustainable levels. Our annual interest payments are ~400B/yr.
Much of that is left hand owing the right hand type stuff, and it's all in our sovereign currency. It's not nothing, but it's not nation-busting levels either.
> Social Security is projected to default next decade.
Only if you make really stupid assumptions.
> We’re back to fighting proxy wars with the Russians, which the supposedly progressive author presents as a positive!
Russia is self-destructing on the Ukrainian bulwark.
> We’ve destroyed South America and the Middle East in pursuit of our strategic goals.
Which we've been doing for the last 150 years or so.
> I hope we don’t provoke china into a war over Taiwan…
We're not substantially closer now than we were at many other points in the last 70 years.
> I love my country but shit is seriously fucked up right now.
If the country is seriously fucked up right now, it's pretty much always been seriously fucked up. I could agree with that statement.
I cannot possibly understand several of your points:
The coup attempt is somehow a GOOD sign for American politics?!
The debt is absolutely an existential threat. The “right hand left hand” BS is directly responsible for the growing wealth gap.
Social security is not sustainable. The default projections are not controversial. Go look it up!
We’re single-handedly financing the war in Ukraine.
The president announced he would defend Taiwan with force but don’t even recognize it as a sovereign nation. The CCP has begun unprecedented military activity around Taiwan. They’re violating their air space on a daily basis probing for weakness. Same as always?! What planet are you on?
None of these are truly new - even the quarter-baked coup attempt (see FDR times.) As for outrageous debt, that began with the US itself.
Which raises the possibility that we're looking at the nasty part of a regular oscillation.
However. The very low birthrate is genuinely new. Drugs/homelessness not new but astonishingly severe. Steep housing prices due to collusion (vs manufactured homes, housing laws, and more) are a large cause of both.
I don’t understand your argument. Just because times have been bad in the past doesn’t mean that America is “going in the right direction”
Did you read the article?
Also the 6 rounds of QE post 2008 is absolutely %100 unprecedented in US history. We have never ever increased the money supply like this. This activity combined with an abundance of cheap credit is what’s creating bubbles in housing, equities and other assets.
So I've said there's decline, but that might be temporary, then given reasons why it might not be temporary. Are you even sure we disagree?
QE is a very recent invention. Inflation, such as during the Civil War, not at all. The money supply went full bonkers - and during the revolution itself; much worse, still. A "Continental" (the dollar of the time) came to mean "worthless."
> Which failed and had little popular or organized military support. We've had a lot worse throughout our history. McVeigh, civil war, et cetera.
Yes, it did fail. Thank God. But the coup plotters have been left to keep plotting for the past two years. If you haven't noticed, the person who committed the coup is still out there telling his millions of followers that he's the rightful President, and that the election he tried to steal was stolen. What happens when he does the same thing in 2024?
To say that McVeigh was worse than Jan6 completely missed what the danger was on that day. The danger isn't to be measured in number of lives lost.
Trump lost in 2020 and will lose again in 2024. Trump is losing ground amongst conservatives, even if only a little bit. The thing is the electorate is so evenly split, actually slightly in favor of the Democrats for president, that even that little ground practically assures a Democrat becomes president in 2024. In fact, the clowns that were just elected to the House are only going to reinforce the idea that Republicans are not the party of responsible governing.
And all that's true if the electorate were static. In reality the Republican's largest voting bloc, the Boomers, are starting their mass die-off. Remember, the oldest Boomers are now 77.
Indeed he lost in 2020, but he still nevertheless almost became President through illegal administrative tricks, abuses of power, and physical force.
Although the 2020 administrative coup failed, the autopsy of that election and the subsequent Jan6 insurrection show exactly the weak points in the plan and why it failed. It wasn't due to some resilient institutional safeguards, like the DOJ, FBI, or even National Guard. All of those institutions failed to protect us. The coup attempt failed because rank-and-file people did their jobs, rather than bend to overt political pressures. Clerks, elections officials, secretaries of state, the VPOTUS - individual people doing their duties and upholding their oaths of office.
By and large, since 2020 these people have been purged and the power of their offices have been usurped by state GOP parties where they have control. These places will never again have the problem of elections officials doing their duties rather than bending to partisan political pressures.
> Trump is losing ground amongst conservatives, even if only a little bit.
If Trump is the nominee, he will have all the support he needs.
> In fact, the clowns that were just elected to the House are only going to reinforce the idea that Republicans are not the party of responsible governing.
Many of those clowns are in fact insurrectionists. Remember, the purpose of the mob on Jan6 was to stop the lawful functioning of Congress to certify the 2020 election. But what may seem clownish is in fact exceedingly dangerous. Republicans have proven they will use their slim majority to completely stall the function of Congress when it serves them politically. There's no need for a mob to stop the business of Congress anymore, there are some elected Representatives who are empowered to throw a wrench into the whole machine if it serves them politically.
The fact that these people were just elected proves their electorate doesn't even care that they're completely ineffective. They can behave as irresponsibly as they like, and they'll be reelected.
> And all that's true if the electorate were static. In reality the Republican's largest voting bloc, the Boomers, are starting their mass die-off. Remember, the oldest Boomers are now 77.
You're not the only one who notices this. You don't think the rise in pro-authoritarian, pro-political violence, anti-democratic rhetoric from Republicans is a coincidence, do you?
> You're not the only one who notices this. You don't think the rise in pro-authoritarian, pro-political violence, anti-democratic rhetoric from Republicans is a coincidence, do you?
You are quite correct. The Republicans are acting like a wild animal trapped in a corner. The Democrats have been a bit, ah, slow, to update their playbook accordingly. The next two years will see us move from one preventable "crises" to another. They may as well make the most of it - their shenanigans are only going to cost them more conservative moderates. I think this Congress will be the last one where the Republicans hold a majority. The big question is how long will it take conservatives to realize the Republican party is no longer viable and create a new party? How will they gate keep the bozos?
You can list a bunch of things, but that's not really measurable and doesn't list the millions of data points that go into a country's well-being. You can look at Jan 6 as a disaster or you can look and say it failed, many of the perpetrators are going to jail and the next election cycle went off without a hitch. You can't stop people from being nuts, but honestly this speaks volumes to the incredible resiliency and durability of our institutions. Similarly, you can look at the economic disasters of the past 20 years as disasters, but you can also look back and say that despite constant doomsaying we never got within a country mile of an actual collapse. Nobody starved, poverty actually decreased during the pandemic despite the deepest economic shock in our history. Again, our institutions did an absolutely phenomenal job of backstopping disaster. Our engagement in Ukraine is hardly our doing. Russia committed massive aggression against a weaker neighbor and America rallied support with impeccable timing to turn the tide without having the fighting spread. You can't prevent bad things from happening, but we've been able to handle the worst of it with aplomb.
And speaking of South America and the Middle East, that's now mostly in the past. To the author's point, the shit we did in the 70s was way worse than now. The shit we did in the 30s was worse than the 70s. You don't have to go back very far to see almost everything being worse than now. So the point isn't so much "Everything is Great" as much "(Almost) Everything is as good or better than it ever was despite not being so great". The assertion is very much that we have a long ways to go, but are absolutely moving in the right direction and pretty consistently so at that.
I appreciate the response but I don’t have the energy to respond to all your points. However:
The west absolutely has some blame for the Ukrainian invasion. It’s a lot more complicated than the narrative of “naked aggression” and has been brewing for decades.
Also we just ended occupation of Afghanistan 18 months ago. It’s not exactly ancient history.
The argument basically boils down to "America has survived turmoil by adapting before - so we should assume it will again".
But that has nothing at all to do with "America is on the right track". If anything, I'd argue that the current pessimism is fairly warranted, and a crucial step in the process of adapting.
The current format doesn't work for most people, in the same way that it didn't in the 1890s. The way we adapted was by tanking the financial industry (great depression) taxing the ever loving fuck out of the "robber baron" class (90%+ taxes) and creating an entirely new social contract (the "new deal").
We also lucked out with our industry remaining intact while the rest of the world dealt with the fallout of the world wars...
Basically - If anything, we are decidedly NOT on the right track right now, but we arguably have the ability (and may be moderately well prepared) to change course.
Optimism about the status quo is... not exactly warranted in my opinion - although pointing out our strengths is a good reminder that we have the ability to change. But it still requires... you know... actually changing.
Changing the course to local needs gets harder and harder every year, as consolidation of federal power hardens.
Wickard v Filburn is case in point of the destruction caused by the New Deal. A man cannot even grow feed and feed it to his own animals without falling into "interstate commerce."
The "lucked out with our industry remaining intact while the rest of the world dealt with the fallout of the world wars" part can't be understated, though.
The reason the new social contract was able to hold was because America was the economic engine that rebuilt the Western world, and enjoyed monopoly industrial status for a while. That a.) created plenty of excess economic value that could support a large middle class b.) created enough social cohesion that the working class could remain unified politically and c.) took away all the other options for would-be capitalists to play governments against each other. They were forced to accept those 90% tax rates and unionized labor contracts because nobody else had any physical capital stock.
There were plenty of efforts to establish a social contract for workers starting in the 1890s, but they never took until the Great Depression, and during the Depression there was a significant chance they would be rolled back. Roosevelt's most ambitious reforms (eg. the NRA [1]) were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and there was an active coup attempt [2] against him. For the first few years after WW2 it was very uncertain if the U.S. would end up sliding back into the Great Depression, until it became clear that the Marshall Plan and other reconstruction efforts would stimulate plenty of demand to keep money coming in and give workers bargaining leverage.
Similarly, the era of the great American Middle Class collapsed in the 1970s, and the catalyst was foreign competition. By then other countries had rebuilt their capital stock and domestic industries. This let them put out products just as good as American ones at prices just as cheap, and because Americans had fat union contracts that allowed them a high standard of living, foreign competitors were able to undercut them. Having a good union contract with your employer does you no good when your employer goes out of business, and that was the situation for many of the dominant 1930s-1970s companies in America in the late 70s through the 80s.
> This let them put out products just as good as American ones at prices just as cheap
Actually, some of the competing products, like cars, were significantly better than American ones. In the 1970s and 1980s, American cars were notoriously unreliable gas guzzlers, and Japanese cars grabbed a large chunk of the U.S. car market (which they have to this day). The resulting loss of jobs in the U.S. auto industry (and in all the industries that supply the auto industry) played a part in the collapse of the middle class in the 1970s, bringing down once thriving cities like Detroit.
One related argument I've read is that after the Russian Revolution of 1917, American capitalists had more incentives to look for points of compromise with labor. The threat/appeal of socialism/communism was helpful to making the New Deal happen and hold.
See the "The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980" by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle — and even more relevant to today, "The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era" by Gerstle.
Too bad that writers and economists don't have concrete skin the game. Maybe some dosh should be put up, or their actual skin as Nasim Taleb wistfully notes (See the story of Sisamnes.)
This article makes a very good case for why the American economy is on the right track. However, I doubt this is what most respondents were thinking about when asked about "the direction of the country" (which to me already sounds like a question that biases people to answer in the negative). Brooks talks repeatedly about how the news media has influenced people's perceptions, but the news media he talks about has (from my perspective) spent more time on social issues rather than the economy, so of course there's a discrepancy there. He's tackling a fundamentally different question than the poll he mentioned. Just because America is on the right track economically does not mean that people are wrong to demand more from their country in other failing areas.
We need more progress. Everything has been getting worse and worse the last 80 years since the New Deal because we just haven't had enough government management to make things good. We should cede more power to the managerial class of academic experts, corporate leaders, and the elite journals (like the Atlantic) that vouch for their brilliance at managing us all, as their poorer and poorer performance is likely because they just haven't had enough control to make more progress.
Yea, it's weird that a previous president's decision in 2018 to disband the National Security Council directorate for global health and security and bio-defense at the White House might've resulted in a lack of preparedness. His decision to completely politicize it and recommend quack-science solutions, from ingesting disinfectant, to "bringing light into the body", to taking random unrelated pharmaceuticals (ivermectin & hydroxychloroquine) might not have helped our response too much either.
I look forward to the next pandemic when Americans start bombing hospitals and vaccination centers the way they do abortion clinics, and purposely infecting themselves out of pure spite.
I could spend hours taking this apart but this part (to borrow a meme) made me throw up a little in my mouth:
> Take out a piece of paper. In one column, list all of the major problems this country faces—inequality, political polarization, social distrust, climate change, and so on. In another column, write seven words: “America has more talent than ever before.”
Life isn't great because a pound of sugar has a lower labor-cost than it did 200 years ago. Here's another nugget:
> From 1980 to 2018, the average amount of time a person had to work to afford the basket of commodities—energy, food, raw materials—that make up a typical middle-class lifestyle fell by 72 percent
I notice housing isn't on that list.
I mean this whole piece could be summed up as "Isn't capitalism, and by extension America, amazing?"
Debt is built into your existence. Student debt, housing debt, medical debt. We have a system ibuilt on the exploitation of labor and the only way for profits to keep increasing is for labor to be squeezed ever more. Every part of your life is being financialized. A workforce living paycheck-to-paycheck is a compliant workforce. This is the road to neufeudalism.
A wealthy conservative Boomer raised by two college professors who had all the opportunity life could grant believes things aren't as bad as they seem. Shocking take, utterly shocking.
There's a strong negativity bias in our system owing in part to the media and in part to the fact that both major political parties need to convince you the nation will collapse if the other party is elected.
It is hard for me to be optimistic. I teach at a community college and in December I went out to a couple local high schools to observe the teachers teaching dual credit classes. Both of the schools were shabby and falling apart. One of the rooms had large areas of paint peeling off the wall. Last summer there was a ballot measure to fund building a new building for a 3rd school. It was overwhelmingly rejected even though there was a story in the newspaper about one of the classrooms being declared unsafe. In many measures of health, education, lifespan, and income my state ranks in the bottom half. Yet the state had a record surplus. What did they do with it? Fund things like education or roads? Cut the state gas tax that is one of the highest in the country? Nope. They gave people a $140 check. Sure that is nice but it would be better to invest in long term improvements. Yet in my state one political party has a supermajority in state politics with no sign of that changing any time soon.
The US is 5th in the world in education spending per student in elementary - HS and 2nd in college. They have the money they need. I would have voted it down too. If they can't afford repairs, they can fire some administrators. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
In the above post I said my state ranks in the bottom half of most measures when compared to other states? Guess where my state ranks in spending per student? Below average by a few thousand...
Meh, as a non-american it seems like a specious list of aspirations that Americans themselves defined. Odd to pick out historical prices of sugar when... you know. They'd really have to have screwed something up for sugar of all commodities to be more expensive than in the middle ages. Deaths from Heart disease and smoking are down, but obesity has reached absurd levels. Productivity gains largely captured by so many other people and things, including hedonism.
America has a lot of positive attributes as a visitor, but this is a deeply unconvincing article and it would take a monumental evolution for me to want to live there long-term.
They do have a certain tenacity though, I'll give them that.
172 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 299 ms ] threadAs for Brooks, he defended the invasion of Iraq for years.
The "foreign army that's been accused of war crimes" is the Israel Defense Forces. Jeffrey Goldberg appears to have written a book about some aspects of his time as a prison guard at Ktzi'ot Prison: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/139269.Prisoners
His new grift is that merica is on the right track because religion and China is done for because heathens.
Another hilarious one was Fukuyama and the whole the end of history grift of the 1990s.
Saying things are fine by the standards of the 1940s isn't helpful either; I'm not sure that's ever really been an appropriate yardstick (I think public health and wellness opportunity costs are often more relevant). I also think you can take many of these same sorts of arguments, go back in time, and find out that many positive indicators preceded very horrific periods in world history. For instance, there were a lot of societal advancements that coincided with the emergence of the world wars, and they still happened despite (or maybe even because) of those advancements.
I also have come to believe that many forms of societal collapse or crisis emerge fairly rapidly; things seem good by many objective indicators until they really don't. If you track some of these public indicators, they often seem to covary relatively weakly with the sorts of things you might expect, and no one really understands why. Seen from a distanced perspective those indicators don't seem to work as measures of what you'd like them to.
I'm not trying to adopt a pessimistic position, as I tend to think a lot of that is equally poorly posed, and I think the article is correct that if you look to history simply for benchmarks of what to expect when something bad happens, things aren't as catastrophic as you'd think. But in the absence of some kind of rigorous understanding of what to look to for societal collapse or catastrophe, these kinds of discussions in either direction are kind of pointless. What seems more relevant are more focal discussions of specific issues, or how to predict what is important.
- GDP gains might reflect an overall loss to society, as the previously untracked work (homemaking) was more valuable than the GDP-tracked work that replaced it… and families are doing substantially worse just to survive
- GDP per capita might not reflect that 99% of society is doing worse as we experience de-industrialization and destruction of our communities because paper gains like ownership stakes in foreign companies and hyper inflated real estate “mask” the losses experienced by most people
I’m curious what US metrics look like if you exclude the top… 5% over the past 50 years. What has life been like for 19 out of 20 people?
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/stagnating-median-incomes-des...
I meant things like income or other household metrics, but only for the bottom 95%.
Precisely because GDP doesn’t give us that insight.
Paper gains and real estate holdings/transactions are not part of GDP.
It shows all the ways that life has actually improved in the last 100 years across the world, for all people.
There’s a reason that populations have risen sharply to all time highs during this period. Infant and maternal mortality have reduced, deaths from deadly diseases have reduced through proliferation of antibiotics and vaccines, people don’t die of starvation from famine anymore in most of the world.
And you can actually see the effect of all of these things. When people are secure that their children will live to see adulthood, they drop from having 5-6 children to 1-2.
Things aren’t perfect, but on that one heartbreaking metric - the % of parents who mourn the loss of a child - the progress is phenomenal.
And that’s just one thing. I could give as many examples as you’d like, some of which might resonate more than others. Here are two more.
- the existence of the internet, smartphones and software powering those phones. We can stay in touch with nearly anyone we want to. We can find communities of like minded people online. It’s safe to say there are many on HN who fit right in but might not fit in their physical neighbourhoods. Companionship and community are critical to our well being.
- conscription is at an all time low. You, reading this, probably will never have to do military service or die for your country. Even many nations that do require service, like Finland, Singapore and South Korea have been at peace for a long, long time. Not dying in wars started by others is fantastic.
- we have access to wider variety of foods - both ingredients and cuisines. Variety that previous generations could only have dreamed of.
- we’ve never had more or better entertainment options. There are more movies, books, TV shows and video games than ever. Even if you felt they were better in the old days, you can enjoy all the entertainment from the old days on your smartphone for the cost of a cheap subscription.
Life isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot better than it used to be. This idea that life sucks because billionaires exist is a sad, small minded philosophy.
I don't blame you. You're acting exactly how most people act in most situations. Dwelling on what they don't have and getting angry about it.
Even if you won the lottery and could afford to have 20 kids and a nanny for each one you still wouldn't be happy. Not because you're bad, but because that's how brain chemistry works. The hundreds of millions from the lottery starts to feel "normal" and you'd be complaining about something else. Like your yacht not being big enough or whatever.
Ultimately the thing that is keeping you unhappy isn't the childcare cost or the spectre of CPS. You're unhappy because it's inherent in the human condition.
It certainly would be. So I think you should consider why else people say what they say.
People are more sensitive to changes, especially negative ones, rather than absolutes. It doesn't matter how many things are good. If things are wrong, they need to improve, and anything that impedes improvement is perceived as negative. If things get worse, that is a big negative score -- especially if somebody says "Hey, it was worse in the past, so be happy that it's not that bad".
A number of things appear to be getting worse now, and a number of it has to do with the very wealthy:
* We just had four years of a Presidency who was very intent on antagonizing his opponents. He is wealthy, and was supported by the party that appealed to the wealthy.
* Even with him (temporarily) out of office, the impulse that put him there is still present. Those same smartphones bring us a constant stream of people who intend to aggravate -- not just bad news, but people who want them to be unhappy.
* Some of that is driven by wealthy people who profit off that unhappiness. It drives engagement, and they sell attention.
* A lot of people feel that their rights are decreasing. Sometimes it's literally true; sometimes it's merely a threat; sometimes it's engagement as in the last point. It doesn't matter, for example, that white people are in zero danger of becoming an oppressed minority; many are certain that it is, and that drives acting out in a way that is harmful.
* It is difficult to ignore a threat with high consequences and low probability. It does no good to tell people that there's a 99.9999% chance that their children won't be shot today -- especially if it's coupled with people dismissing the ones who are shot.
And so on. My point is that it is not "life sucks because billionaires", and in fact life sucks because people think that they only thing they're complaining about is "because billionaires". That means nobody is helping as things get worse, and even standing in the way.
His point is people think American is much worse off than it actually is and he backs that up.
Complete nonsense. Discussing what the temperature of an object is overall is meaningless, because it's made of individual atoms and molecules that do their own thing...
China was a potential threat to the US global technological, industrial and military superiority, but since the 10 year change of leadership was abandoned I don't think they are a real threat anymore. Their dictator will concentrate on keeping his power and not on developing the country.
I'm no Trump fanatic, but I still do not understand what people's real problem is with him either. Most of their problems seem to be made up. You can see it most clearly in the Jan 6th committee, who were committed by any means to suggesting that Trump incited violence even though he directly and plainly called for peaceful protest and spoke against violence that day, yet they showed none of that during the "trials".
And aside from that - pretending fraud isn't real or is an impossibility in an American election is incredibly naive. That's like saying Chicago can't have gun violence. Elections should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly.
Sure there's no problem with that. But that's not what Trump and his team did.
Trump claimed there was fraud so loudly not because he wanted to find actual fraud (which he had no reason to believe existed), but because he wanted people to be very concerned with the idea the election was potentially fraudulent. He wanted people to be concerned with this idea because it legitimized his true motivations - he wanted power for himself.
Trump's team didn't actually want to find fraud; no, their goal was to create an environment of suspicion about fraud, but they had absolutely no intention whatsoever to prove their case. We know this because in all of the 60+ court cases they brought, they never alleged fraud, let alone attempted to prove it. If they did, they would have revealed they had zero evidence for their claims. Of course for this reason, they lost every single case (except I think an early PA case that didn't even relate to claims of fraud).
And it needs to be said that the elections were investigated. Georgia investigated every claim made by the President, and found none of them credible. If Trump were genuinely concerned with finding fraud and simply questioning the results of the election, he would have been satisfied with their process. But the process didn't end up with him winning Georgia, so he wasn't satisfied, to the point that he threatened Georgia elections officials with prosecution when they refused to overturn his loss there.
So yes, when it comes to elections generally, they should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly. But we must also say in the same breath that we cannot let disingenuous concerns about "election integrity" actually undermine elections. That's a problem too, which has demonstrably lead to a coup attempt and violent insurrection. So I would say "voter fraud hysteria" is actually a worse problem than voter fraud itself, which is proven to be rare and hasn't caused any coups or insurrections.
You'll need an industrial grade lube to get a slope that slippery.
> And aside from that - pretending fraud isn't real or is an impossibility in an American election is incredibly naive. That's like saying Chicago can't have gun violence.
Nice and a strawman too.
> Elections should absolutely be questioned and audited regularly.
Ballot counting is watched by representatives of both parties. Neutral third parties agree that systemic voter fraud is unlikely to be happening at scale, and we do try to catch the dumbasses that try to cheat on an individual scale fairly easily. We can also add a false equivalence to your rapid fire fallacies.
"Questioning" an election is not the same thing as decrying fraud and trying to convince courts to overturn the results when you have no evidence of fraud.
It's quite another to go to a court, not because you have evidence, but because you want to avail yourself of their power to overturn the election by making some convincing argument. Or, short of that, to use the context of a court battle to give a patina of legitimacy to otherwise baseless accusations and FUD (lawyers are great at making bullshit sound convincing in a lawsuit).
That's what the Trump team did, and those are not the kind of people we should be letting near power (those who show an eager willingness to use institutions corruptly).
"No, ban the vocal disbelievers from social media, and ban their candidates from participating. Or imprison them."
Virtually every other institution has lost credibility in public opinion polls. Why should elections be any different? The losing side will always cry foul, as they have for multiple elections now: 2000, 2004, 2016 and 2020. It is tempting to look the other way, when the one you voted for happened to win.
Dems response to this was not good in my opinion. There is obviously a large population of voters that believe that fowl play is happening in elections, instead of working to increase transparency - there are a lot of things we can do like increased auditing or coming up with a more open way to verify votes - they doubled down and are attacking those who are asking questions. These are fellow Americans, they should not be demonized, we should work to improve election integrity and openness, increase everyones' confidence in election integrity.
Were you not alive for Bush v. Gore ? All of us on the left denied the legitimacy of that election, loudly, repeatedly, and I don't remember that being considered an "enormous threat to the nature of democracy".
If you believe this is what Jan 6 was about, you didn't pay attention to what the Committee found.
In fact it was an administrative coup first, which involved various state GOP parties, various GOP House Reps (Biggs, Gosar, Greene, and Jordan among them), various GOP Senators (Johnson and Cruz among them), the White House (President, Vice President, Chief of Staff, and various lawyers including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell). It was a conspiracy to commit fraud at the highest levels of the government, and the Committee lays it all out.
Trump knew he lost the election very early on, but wanted to stay in power nonetheless. He admits this to many advisors and the Jan6 committee proves this through under-oath testimony which is not hearsay. They've released the transcripts, you can read them for yourself.
John Eastman comes to him with a plan. This was the coup plot he called the "Green Bay Sweep":
- Forge state certificates of the vote electing Trump, transmit them to the VP. This is illegal.
- Have senators and house members object to real certificates of the vote electing Biden. This is legal
- Have VP toss out real certificates. He does not have the power to do this.
- These contests start a clock, that when it runs out, if a President Elect is not certified, it goes to state delegations for a majority vote. Republicans controlled the majority of state delegations at the time, so they would have installed Trump despite him losing the popular and electoral college votes.
- The next step would probably be the Democrats would sue, it would make it to SCOTUS, and SCOTUS at that point likely wouldn't have taken the case, citing separation of powers (Constitution makes clear the only way to remove POTUS is impeachment or 25th amendment. SCOTUS has no power to do so, and how would they enforce it anyway?). DOJ wouldn't prosecute anyone because it would be controlled by Trump. This would have effectively ended democracy in America.
BTW that speech in question? Why did he need everyone there on Jan6? To pressure Pence. He was the key to the whole thing, as he was tasked with overstepping his clear duties as VP at the Jan6 vote counting ceremony, and in doing so would have violated the Constitution. But in the days leading up to Jan6, Pence made clear to Trump that he was going to do the right thing, and that would have been the end of Trump's administrative coup plot. That's where the insurrection comes in.
The Jan6 committee found that Trump knew the audience were armed. He instructed his SS to stop taking their weapons. He told the audience to go to the Capitol and "fight like hell". He told them there was a massive fraud and the election was stole, and the rules are very different in those circumstances. He was preceded by his lawyer, who told the audience that a "trial by combat" was in order. He instructed them to go to the Capitol to obstruct the vote count ("stop the steal"), which was exactly what his administrative coup plot required.
And they did. They did everything Trump wanted, and he played his part by sitting back and letting it happen, instead of doing, well.... anything. Well, aside from further inciting the mob over Twitter as he watched them attack the Capitol on TV. He did do that.
It would have worked too if it wasn't for two things:
1. Pence didn't leave the Capitol.
2. McConnell/Pelosi reconvened the Senate/House and they worked through the night to certify Biden as President Elect.
If those two things hadn't happened, Trump's plan (really Eastman's) could have very well worked, and we'd be living in a very different country right now.
That is why people don't like Trump -- because he's the kind of person (an authoritarian wannabe dictator) who worked to make that happen. We were saying so the whole ...
> He told the audience to go to the Capitol and "fight like hell"
You're using the quoted part with the first part of your sentence to spread false information. Anybody that reads the full quote and context of the speech [2] knows he wasn't talking about fighting at the Capitol. Biden and Harris have said "fight like hell" many times, but nobody uses their quotes out of context to insinuate advocacy for some theoretical coup.
Everything the President said related to the activities at the Capitol was about keeping it peaceful.
On Jan 6, 2021, the President tweeted:
"Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!" [0]
and
"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!" [1]
In addition, at the rally prior to the protest at the Capitol, he said:
"I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard." [2]
> The Jan6 committee found that Trump knew the audience were armed.
Armed with what? Firearms? And how could he know that? Exactly zero protestors at the Capitol were found to have been carrying firearms.
> That's where the insurrection comes in.
"insurrection" | noun | a violent uprising against an authority or government
Surely an actual insurrection would have involved at least one protestor bringing at least one firearm.
> Trump knew he lost the election very early on, but wanted to stay in power nonetheless.
The whole claim that he tried to stay in power is facially absurd. He didn't try to stay in power... he willingly handed over power as evidenced by the fact that there was a peaceful transition of power.
It's fine to disapprove of Trump, but this rambling unproven conspiracy stuff the January 6th Committee did was on a whole new level. Their entire goal was to get Trump disqualified and tarnish his image, no matter where the facts actually led.
[0] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13469041109693153...
[1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13469127807005777...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-s...
> What you're bringing up--particularly the actions of the Senators, Representatives, and lawyers--are legitimate and legal avenues to pursue if one disputes election results.
Of course legislators and lawyers enjoy certain rights. However, those rights are not without limitations. For example, it's fine for a lawyer to file a lawsuit, but it's not fine to do so frivolously or fraudulently. Doing so would incur professional consequences. And indeed, Trump's lawyers who worked with him have faced professional consequences for their roles: Giuliani has lost his right to practice law in NY [1], and Sidney Powell is currently undergoing professional review [2] which might result in the same.
> Democrats have used those avenues in the past, too.
As for legislators, it's fine for them to raise an objection about an election. They enjoy that right. They can do so for a legitimate reason, or than can do so to make a political statement, as you note Democrats have done. What they can't do is use their position to obstruct the proceeding with corrupt intent.
In order for an objection to be raised, a House Rep and Senator must both object. This happened in this case and is fine. But the reasons for their objections had already been litigated. By the 1/6 ceremony, exactly 0 claims of fraud were raised in the appropriate venue (a courtroom), so to raise them exclusively on cable news and the House floor does not evidence a good faith concern about "election integrity".
I'm not the only one who thought the role of various House members on and surrounding 1/6 was suspect; we know several of them sought pardons, and they all have yet to answer why. Why seek a pardon if you don't have consciousness of guilt?
Furthermore, while it may be the right of some state lawmakers to certify federal elections, it's not okay for them to do so in a clandestine and manner in order to transmit a fraudulent certificate of the vote to the Vice President. That happened and it's not okay.
> You're using the quoted part with the first part of your sentence to spread false information.
If we're going to take the out-of-context utterance of the word "peaceful" during a speech to be prima-facie evidence of the intent of the speaker to be peaceful, then we must also take the out-of-context utterance of the word "fight" to be evidence of intent of violence.
The context of the event was that Trump summoned those people to that place based on a lie, one he knew to be false. There was and still is no proof of any of his claims. Not a single one. To stand up there and repeat them in front of a massive crowd is to effect a fraud. He then asked them to do something very specific: march to the Capitol, and "stop the steal", which was a euphemism for obstructing the proceeding. And how did he want them to do it? Trump told them. He said that because of the fraud (for which he had no evidence) that it was fair to play by a very "different" set of rules. Different how? Well Rudy had told them just minutes before: "Trial by combat!" (he screamed to thunderous applause from the armed crowed).
Then Trump directed them to the Capitol, and combat ensued. If you read the court transcripts, defendant after defendant says they thought they were doing what Trump wanted. They thought they were acting on the orders of POTUS.
This is a pretty cut and dry cause and effect. He got people mad over a lie, told them what to do about it, and then watched it happen, as they did exactly what he wanted.
> Everything the President said related to the activities at the Capitol was about keeping it peaceful.
I notice you've left out the crucial tweet he sent during the riots, wherein he expressed displeasure at his VP's failure to follow the plan, which was met by the crowd with renewed calls for violence and death.
Look, I am well aware of the tweets ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/t-magazine/vacation-four-...
An example; the ruling class promoting unfettered immigration and “Our Democracy” does not make people at least a bit suspicious of their motivations? Billionaires pushing immigration to import cheap labor? Billionaires pushing the populace having a supposed vote?
But then again, this forum is very much a body representing ruling class agents at the very least, and it is immensely difficult for people to admit, let alone just contemplate that they are possibly not the good and great people they think themselves of. This YN forum isn’t all that different than a palace parlor where the aristocratic strata of the past who told themselves all kind of things about how they need to impose their ideas on the working class … for their own benefits, which magically happen to coincide with only advantaging the aristocracy. It’s really no differ than in the past; be it the feudal European aristocracy, the Southern aristocracy, or the technocratic modern aristocracy that is deceptive and secretive about what they need to impose on the commoners but not on themselves.
I was surprised by this claim. I was always under the impression that poorer people spent more time consuming news media, and that the wealthier a person was, the less news they consumed. I don't know where I got such an impression, and I think I may have confused the statistics for television watching in general. Does anyone have a good source showing a correlation in either direction?
Perhaps David Brooks believes the working class get their news from Facebook memes. It's the only explanation that allows me to make his statement congruous.
I haven't had cable for over two decades now. I only catch cable news in the early morning when I'm in a Best Western lobby trying to pull a waffle out of the waffle iron.
Too bad. I believe that change brought about through violence will only lead to a violent regime.
France is one that came to mind. Violent regime? Of course not. But they did have to tread through a reign of terror after their Révolution française.
Perhaps you eventually get to a peaceful regime. But it's hard to imagine power sweeping into control on a wave of violence suddenly shuttering that same violence.
Historians point to this behavior by George Washington as essentially one-of-a-kind in human history.
I'm reminded of the scene in "Seven Samurai" when the villagers bring the seven samurai armor and weapons from dead samurai and Toshiro Mifune's character explodes at the peasants — always pretending to be afraid, humble, powerless, but all the while hoarding weapons, food....
On one hand you have a brave but tragic resistance like Iran right now where dozens of young people have protested and been brutally cut down or publically executed.
On the other hand you have numerous times in history where a government has learned the phrase "Governments are supposed to fear their people". Usually fire is involved.
Both will eventually achieve their aims, but the first example is usually slower and more costly to do so.
Many conflicts start as the first type and become the second.
Yes people pay more for housing, however in 1975 the average American home was 560 Sq Ft/person in 2015 it hit 1058 Sq Ft/person. https://thefioneers.com/average-home-size/
So people are paying more for housing, they are also getting a lot more of it. Similarly people keep moving to expensive cities which shockingly have expensive housing.
It costs exponentially more, but cancer is killing fewer people today than a generation ago. https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/research/update-on-cancer-de...
People move to expensive cities because that's where the jobs are. Nobody moves to Fort Bragg, even though it has practically the same climate and coastline as San Francisco, because there's no money to be made.
Handwaving these economic forces away as "quality increases" is misleading.
Also as a home builder once you realize how expensive the permitting process can be you're suddenly motivated to build big. The permitting doesn't scale with structure size, it is fixed in most areas.
The finishes have also gotten worse, in many ways. These expensive McMansions have worse trim, doors (interior and exterior), and sometimes flooring than cheap working-class houses in the '60s and '70s. Better windows I guess. At least as far as energy efficiency goes. Better insulation. Basically if code says it has to be better, it is, and everything else is worse.
Are more things really adding to our quality of life, or is that just consumerism talking?
Lots of families need multiple incomes to pay for those bigger houses, compared to 1975 [0]. And zoning regulations don't allow enough housing to be built in the cities with good job and social opportunities where people would like to live. Seems to be more optimized for investors than families and quality of life.
[0] https://listwithclever.com/research/home-price-v-income-hist...
Consumerism isn’t a need. Give up the large house in an expensive area, cellphone, high tech car, computer, cable TV, etc and suddenly you can get by without working so hard just like my parents generation.
It is not possible for America to be on the right track when it is not no longer on the America track. Those are mutually excluding things, like a man abducting a child having the child’s best interest in mind.
No matter what track we are on, we are clearly no longer on the American track when America is being denigrated and abused and destroyed in all aspects but the name.
Is it the right track? That’s a different question altogether, but if the person making such a statement is being deceptive and manipulative in their language, it is reasonable to assume they are also not honest in their motivations and intent, hostile even.
This is possibly a bad example; the overwhelming majority of "kidnappings" of children are by one parent as a result of a dispute with the other parent. In that case, the "abducting" parent might well have (and almost certainly think they have) the best interests of the child in mind (never mind that the other parent and/or the state apparatus might disagree).
We had a half baked coup attempt in 2020.
People are polarizing in ways that weren't around only a few years ago.
The congressional deficit has ballooned to unsustainable levels. Our annual interest payments are ~400B/yr.
Social Security is projected to default next decade.
We’re back to fighting proxy wars with the Russians, which the supposedly progressive author presents as a positive!
We’ve destroyed South America and the Middle East in pursuit of our strategic goals.
I hope we don’t provoke china into a war over Taiwan…
I love my country but shit is seriously fucked up right now.
This one gets me the worst. America's political landscape is forever changed. 1. Political discourse between sides is so aggressive that morals, the truth, etc, are trumped by 'Who cares? My team is winning.' 2. Congressional cooperation has fallen to levels where the entirety of the government is incapable of making simple, easy decisions, and even when they do, it must help a talking point. 3. This divide has spread outwards into other branches of government in such a way that breaks the entire intent of checks and balances. At this point, the Supreme court is just doing a congressional party's bidding. This seems like 'balance' to other branches but it actually limits the ability for the supreme court to make impartial choices and means that a regime change in congress/ president will fully eliminate checks and balance. The government will answer to a party's bidding rather than the constitution or people. 4. A majority of people in one party no longer trust the electoral system while a majority in the other party see signs that the game is rigged against them (Gerrymandering). This causes a general feeling of 'We lost because of X, not because of us.'
But finally, to me, the worst item...
5. Politics in America are now about feeling right and 'winning' rather than promises and goals. This was always in the background and any marketer will tell you this is how human minds work...but this change accelerates the rest. It doesn't matter what policy is passed or how it plays out, as long as 'I feel right.' Politics now realize that success is a 'sick burn' or a 'scary claim about "them"', not actual improvement of the country. Why? One of these is publicity and moves individual donations...it helps get you elected. It fires up your base because it is way easier to sell negative emotions ("I hate them", "They are going to kill america, we have to save it") rather than positive ("Our government is doing good things.")
This means you need puppets, people in your party for their party to hate and people in their party for your party to hate. Alas, you get Trump, AOC, McConnell, Pelosi, Gatez. Each party knows this agreement is fantastic, or has learned it at least. Why? Because if, say, the GOP did not have a 'them' it would be impossible to sell.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/nyregion/gop-path-recalls...
David Brooks is absolutely not a progressive. The very first sentence of his Wikipedia page is:
> David Brooks (born August 11, 1961)[1] is a conservative political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times
The same term applies to neo-conservatives as well. Ideology is more a means to maintain power and less about a realistic goal.
Last time I heard it is closer to 700B per annum
There has been a regression in abortion rights in some states, but there is still significantly better access to abortions than any time prior to the 1970s.
There has been a hint that there might be a regression in LGBT rights, but there are still far more rights than any time pre-2010.
We have entire states where abortion has been effectively outlawed. Transgender people, a tiny minority of the population have been relentlessly targeted:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/republican-states-aim-...
If it doesn't affect you or someone you care about, it might be a "hint", for the people it does affect, it's a disaster in the making.
I'm not American and I'm only interested in this for the entertainment value. I enjoy very much the lack of self awareness.
You should just make your comment clearly idk what you’re getting at.
Fighting and winning. We've managed to degrade the Russian army to the point where they are fielding tanks from the 1970's and all for less than $50 billion and 0 US casualties. If that's not a positive, I don't know what is.
I agree it’s working to destabilize the Russian federation. The question is: “is it worth it?”
100B+ in military spending, destroying Ukraine, dramatically weakening the European economy seems like a pretty steep price for fighting the ghost of the USSR.
In general we have a pretty terrible track record for acting as world police. Arming the Mujahideen during the Soviet-afghan war did defeat the soviets…but the aftermath was horrendous for the region.
That’s the difference in this situation—we’re not acting as world police. We’re helping an allied nation defend itself.
You should keep in mind that Ukraine would be more destroyed without American and other western help, not less.
The US for the first time in a long time is supplying a side in a war that has a clear good a bad side.
> We had a half baked coup attempt in 2020.
Which failed and had little popular or organized military support. We've had a lot worse throughout our history. McVeigh, civil war, et cetera.
> People are polarizing in ways that weren't around only a few years ago.
But compared to the polarization of late 1800's?
> The congressional deficit has ballooned to unsustainable levels. Our annual interest payments are ~400B/yr.
Much of that is left hand owing the right hand type stuff, and it's all in our sovereign currency. It's not nothing, but it's not nation-busting levels either.
> Social Security is projected to default next decade.
Only if you make really stupid assumptions.
> We’re back to fighting proxy wars with the Russians, which the supposedly progressive author presents as a positive!
Russia is self-destructing on the Ukrainian bulwark.
> We’ve destroyed South America and the Middle East in pursuit of our strategic goals.
Which we've been doing for the last 150 years or so.
> I hope we don’t provoke china into a war over Taiwan…
We're not substantially closer now than we were at many other points in the last 70 years.
> I love my country but shit is seriously fucked up right now.
If the country is seriously fucked up right now, it's pretty much always been seriously fucked up. I could agree with that statement.
The coup attempt is somehow a GOOD sign for American politics?!
The debt is absolutely an existential threat. The “right hand left hand” BS is directly responsible for the growing wealth gap.
Social security is not sustainable. The default projections are not controversial. Go look it up!
We’re single-handedly financing the war in Ukraine.
The president announced he would defend Taiwan with force but don’t even recognize it as a sovereign nation. The CCP has begun unprecedented military activity around Taiwan. They’re violating their air space on a daily basis probing for weakness. Same as always?! What planet are you on?
Which raises the possibility that we're looking at the nasty part of a regular oscillation.
However. The very low birthrate is genuinely new. Drugs/homelessness not new but astonishingly severe. Steep housing prices due to collusion (vs manufactured homes, housing laws, and more) are a large cause of both.
Did you read the article?
Also the 6 rounds of QE post 2008 is absolutely %100 unprecedented in US history. We have never ever increased the money supply like this. This activity combined with an abundance of cheap credit is what’s creating bubbles in housing, equities and other assets.
QE is a very recent invention. Inflation, such as during the Civil War, not at all. The money supply went full bonkers - and during the revolution itself; much worse, still. A "Continental" (the dollar of the time) came to mean "worthless."
But none of it is new or unique.
We’re discussing the article right?
Single handedly helping a country defend itself from an invader that is attempting to eradicate it.
Yes, it did fail. Thank God. But the coup plotters have been left to keep plotting for the past two years. If you haven't noticed, the person who committed the coup is still out there telling his millions of followers that he's the rightful President, and that the election he tried to steal was stolen. What happens when he does the same thing in 2024?
To say that McVeigh was worse than Jan6 completely missed what the danger was on that day. The danger isn't to be measured in number of lives lost.
And all that's true if the electorate were static. In reality the Republican's largest voting bloc, the Boomers, are starting their mass die-off. Remember, the oldest Boomers are now 77.
Indeed he lost in 2020, but he still nevertheless almost became President through illegal administrative tricks, abuses of power, and physical force.
Although the 2020 administrative coup failed, the autopsy of that election and the subsequent Jan6 insurrection show exactly the weak points in the plan and why it failed. It wasn't due to some resilient institutional safeguards, like the DOJ, FBI, or even National Guard. All of those institutions failed to protect us. The coup attempt failed because rank-and-file people did their jobs, rather than bend to overt political pressures. Clerks, elections officials, secretaries of state, the VPOTUS - individual people doing their duties and upholding their oaths of office.
By and large, since 2020 these people have been purged and the power of their offices have been usurped by state GOP parties where they have control. These places will never again have the problem of elections officials doing their duties rather than bending to partisan political pressures.
> Trump is losing ground amongst conservatives, even if only a little bit.
If Trump is the nominee, he will have all the support he needs.
> In fact, the clowns that were just elected to the House are only going to reinforce the idea that Republicans are not the party of responsible governing.
Many of those clowns are in fact insurrectionists. Remember, the purpose of the mob on Jan6 was to stop the lawful functioning of Congress to certify the 2020 election. But what may seem clownish is in fact exceedingly dangerous. Republicans have proven they will use their slim majority to completely stall the function of Congress when it serves them politically. There's no need for a mob to stop the business of Congress anymore, there are some elected Representatives who are empowered to throw a wrench into the whole machine if it serves them politically.
The fact that these people were just elected proves their electorate doesn't even care that they're completely ineffective. They can behave as irresponsibly as they like, and they'll be reelected.
> And all that's true if the electorate were static. In reality the Republican's largest voting bloc, the Boomers, are starting their mass die-off. Remember, the oldest Boomers are now 77.
You're not the only one who notices this. You don't think the rise in pro-authoritarian, pro-political violence, anti-democratic rhetoric from Republicans is a coincidence, do you?
You are quite correct. The Republicans are acting like a wild animal trapped in a corner. The Democrats have been a bit, ah, slow, to update their playbook accordingly. The next two years will see us move from one preventable "crises" to another. They may as well make the most of it - their shenanigans are only going to cost them more conservative moderates. I think this Congress will be the last one where the Republicans hold a majority. The big question is how long will it take conservatives to realize the Republican party is no longer viable and create a new party? How will they gate keep the bozos?
And speaking of South America and the Middle East, that's now mostly in the past. To the author's point, the shit we did in the 70s was way worse than now. The shit we did in the 30s was worse than the 70s. You don't have to go back very far to see almost everything being worse than now. So the point isn't so much "Everything is Great" as much "(Almost) Everything is as good or better than it ever was despite not being so great". The assertion is very much that we have a long ways to go, but are absolutely moving in the right direction and pretty consistently so at that.
The west absolutely has some blame for the Ukrainian invasion. It’s a lot more complicated than the narrative of “naked aggression” and has been brewing for decades.
Also we just ended occupation of Afghanistan 18 months ago. It’s not exactly ancient history.
The argument basically boils down to "America has survived turmoil by adapting before - so we should assume it will again".
But that has nothing at all to do with "America is on the right track". If anything, I'd argue that the current pessimism is fairly warranted, and a crucial step in the process of adapting.
The current format doesn't work for most people, in the same way that it didn't in the 1890s. The way we adapted was by tanking the financial industry (great depression) taxing the ever loving fuck out of the "robber baron" class (90%+ taxes) and creating an entirely new social contract (the "new deal").
We also lucked out with our industry remaining intact while the rest of the world dealt with the fallout of the world wars...
Basically - If anything, we are decidedly NOT on the right track right now, but we arguably have the ability (and may be moderately well prepared) to change course.
Optimism about the status quo is... not exactly warranted in my opinion - although pointing out our strengths is a good reminder that we have the ability to change. But it still requires... you know... actually changing.
Wickard v Filburn is case in point of the destruction caused by the New Deal. A man cannot even grow feed and feed it to his own animals without falling into "interstate commerce."
The reason the new social contract was able to hold was because America was the economic engine that rebuilt the Western world, and enjoyed monopoly industrial status for a while. That a.) created plenty of excess economic value that could support a large middle class b.) created enough social cohesion that the working class could remain unified politically and c.) took away all the other options for would-be capitalists to play governments against each other. They were forced to accept those 90% tax rates and unionized labor contracts because nobody else had any physical capital stock.
There were plenty of efforts to establish a social contract for workers starting in the 1890s, but they never took until the Great Depression, and during the Depression there was a significant chance they would be rolled back. Roosevelt's most ambitious reforms (eg. the NRA [1]) were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and there was an active coup attempt [2] against him. For the first few years after WW2 it was very uncertain if the U.S. would end up sliding back into the Great Depression, until it became clear that the Marshall Plan and other reconstruction efforts would stimulate plenty of demand to keep money coming in and give workers bargaining leverage.
Similarly, the era of the great American Middle Class collapsed in the 1970s, and the catalyst was foreign competition. By then other countries had rebuilt their capital stock and domestic industries. This let them put out products just as good as American ones at prices just as cheap, and because Americans had fat union contracts that allowed them a high standard of living, foreign competitors were able to undercut them. Having a good union contract with your employer does you no good when your employer goes out of business, and that was the situation for many of the dominant 1930s-1970s companies in America in the late 70s through the 80s.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#NRA_%22Blue_Eagle%22_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
Actually, some of the competing products, like cars, were significantly better than American ones. In the 1970s and 1980s, American cars were notoriously unreliable gas guzzlers, and Japanese cars grabbed a large chunk of the U.S. car market (which they have to this day). The resulting loss of jobs in the U.S. auto industry (and in all the industries that supply the auto industry) played a part in the collapse of the middle class in the 1970s, bringing down once thriving cities like Detroit.
See the "The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980" by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle — and even more relevant to today, "The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era" by Gerstle.
Having trouble taking a David Brooks opinion piece seriously is…not a bad sign.
The USA and the UK were at the very top, being considered the best.
It might have been this one: https://www.statista.com/chart/20629/ability-to-respond-to-a...
Notice how Ireland is obviously worse than the UK.
Portugal also worse than Spain.
USA on the best tier. (No one is green I think)
Another one even better:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/global-pandemic-preparednes...
USA at the very top followed obviously by all the anglosphere.
Brazil, Belgium and Japan at the same level!
Now contrast this with reality.
If this pandemic showed anything is that the premise of this post is completely wrong.
Look how that turned out.
Must really suck having to spend so much energy ignoring reality.
Then again, given the level of religiosity of the place I guess it really doesn't take that much extra energy.
Although I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have made much of a difference.
This is what winning looks like!
> Take out a piece of paper. In one column, list all of the major problems this country faces—inequality, political polarization, social distrust, climate change, and so on. In another column, write seven words: “America has more talent than ever before.”
Life isn't great because a pound of sugar has a lower labor-cost than it did 200 years ago. Here's another nugget:
> From 1980 to 2018, the average amount of time a person had to work to afford the basket of commodities—energy, food, raw materials—that make up a typical middle-class lifestyle fell by 72 percent
I notice housing isn't on that list.
I mean this whole piece could be summed up as "Isn't capitalism, and by extension America, amazing?"
Debt is built into your existence. Student debt, housing debt, medical debt. We have a system ibuilt on the exploitation of labor and the only way for profits to keep increasing is for labor to be squeezed ever more. Every part of your life is being financialized. A workforce living paycheck-to-paycheck is a compliant workforce. This is the road to neufeudalism.
America has a lot of positive attributes as a visitor, but this is a deeply unconvincing article and it would take a monumental evolution for me to want to live there long-term.
They do have a certain tenacity though, I'll give them that.