. . . "after the coup attempt, the riots, the street battles, 'cancel culture', and the surge in crime." It was not a coup attempt, much less the oft-trumpeted "armed insurrection" . . . and those fomenting or at least ignoring if not cheering the riots, street battles, cancel culture, and surge in crime are from the left. And we will not be "moving on from that" as long as the same people who caused the disruption are still running the show.
It was a coup attempt, as the 800 convictions support, including those for seditious conspiracy. It was a coup attempt as the recent indictment of Trump (and eventual indictments of 6 unnamed co-conspirators) attests.
As to cancel culture, that's all coming from the GOP at this point (censoring speech, banning books, limiting education).
Where are the riots in the streets? Do you mean the neo-Nazis strutting in the streets, or those carrying Confederate flags and guns, calling for the FBI to be dismantled?
A professor with a botched hiring (they never pulled the job offer) gets $1 million dollars without suing anyone, keeps her current job, the person responsible resigns, and the school publicly apologizes.
If that's getting cancelled where do I sign up. :)
My earlier comment was in large part rhetorical, of course there are two sides to this, I just think (as a liberal) the idea that the GOP is out cancelling the left is satire.
Whataboutism at it's finest. The attack on the capitol was unprecedented in history. Maybe when the British burned the White House compares. Do you remember the summer of 1968?
My dad had a pharmacy on 79 st and Ashland in Chicago, an Irish-American neighborhood, race relations were ok. Until Dr. King was assassinated. Riots swept through, and my dad's store was spared, but the neighborhood totally changed. After being robbed twice in a month he locked the doors and walked away.
They're not little enough. Not only do they, in the words of author John Scalzi, get to play life at the lowest difficulty setting, they also need cheat codes to get past every stage.
Agree 100%. And you cannot measure the despair many of us feel as fellow Americans pronounce their disdain for our history and culture, praising thuggery and expressing contempt for law enforcement
Yes, but it Republicans politicians who "pronounce their disdain for our history and culture, praising thuggery and expressing contempt for law enforcement" and they are the one that are most unhappy. Seem odd!
The attempted coup wasn't only, or even mainly, on the steps of the Capital: as we now know it was centered in the Oval Office from where it sought to spread to the great offices of state, the capitals of the States, and those charged with running the machinery of democracy.
Yes, you are correct that it is an epistemological question. Assuming you are a person of good will (putting aside the ad hominem snark of your response), then we are both watching the same events on the same screen . . . but seeing two completely different movies. One of us is obviously closer to seeing reality than the other . . . but how we together figure out the truth of the matter is the hard part. I am pretty sure, though, that petty snarkiness is not the way.
And, as in the last essay by Noah attempting to show how well off our economy is, the problem of our national debt is not even mentioned. Due to my work, I move in circles from corporate executives, small business owner, tech startups, tradesmen to retirees and there is a nagging concern from all of them that our level of debt is unsustainable and that much of the money being spent is wasted. I know no one who honestly believes that their children's lives will be a little bit better than their own and that is the cloud casting a pall over every other consideration.
Add Depreciation of infrastructure and Depletion of easy to access natural resources to Debt. Sorry Noah you missed the 3Ds. They are coming for all of us!
Regan pulled the wool over many people’s eyes. Being president was his greatest acting role.
Here are two examples of how many of today’s problems are directly related to his sly shenanigans:
Sundial (Northridge, Los Angeles, Calif.) 1966-10-14 - Daily Sundial - CSUN University Library Digital Collections: A. S. President John Cagle, along with 14 student leaders from Southern California have come out against gubematorial candidate Ronald Reagan's proposal to charge tuition in the State's colleges and universities.
Excellent article. I lived through that era as well and despised the ad. Morning in America had quite a lot more to do with national confidence in the ability of political leadership to take us further away from where we had been in 1980 -- paralysis with Iran, inability to handle Soviet aggression, and the galling aimlessness of the 70s. The economic reality was that deindustrialization was well underway. Two other big differences between then and today: (1) national debt is substantially higher across all metrics than it was then, and moderate, sane voters know there is a reckoning ahead for us in one form or another, and (2) a majority of respondents to polls today would be unrecognizable to adults in the 80s - either complete reality-deniers who will say and believe anything to reelect Trump (40% or so of all respondents), and another 25-30% of respondents who are socialists and who, without basis, expect equal outcomes and endless government spending and who remain convinced that our country is fundamentally racist, our economy rigged, and our politics run by wealthy elites. Why else would we expect these respondents to tell us they think things are going well?
Interesting to see that consumer sentiment and general satisfaction seem to follow along the same path relatively well until 2010-2020 where consumer sentiment climbs but satisfaction flatlines. Perhaps supporting the idea that its not necessarily economic reasons behind recent dissatisfaction.
Also, I think the proportion of income spent on mortgage servicing is a better indicator of housing affordability rather that just the mortgage rate. House prices have risen quickly over the past decade meaning that many household spend as much or more of their income on mortgage repayments despite the lower interest rates.
Inflation is popular to talk about. But inflation is the first derivative of prices, and prices is what actually matters to people. Nominal prices probably look like a fairly smooth increase in the Reagen years but look pretty flat with a sudden jump recently.
As long as you're confining your analysis to overall economic measurements, you will be mystified by the disconnect between American GDP and happiness. But most of Maslowe's hierarchy of needs isn't purchasable. Once you're not starving and freezing, most of what drives human happiness is social and cultural, not economic (just look at Maslowe's list.)
That's how a society with soaring GDP numbers can be so miserable. We're doing well financially (at least the top 30% are, the not-college-educated not so much), but our social and cultural stability is collapsing. What makes people happy is being able to raise families with reasonable economic security, in a peaceful society, within a broadly shared moral order. This applies to essentially EVERYONE in the world, no mater their standard of living or nationality.
The problem is that Mill's modern liberalism corrodes that shared moral order in the name of ensuring maximal individual autonomy. He admits this in On Liberty -- tearing down all constraints on human action (other than harm to others) is his admitted agenda. However, a society that agrees on nothing except "my rights only end at your nose" is probably only appealing to libertarian economists.
Most people need shared moral and cultural and social commitments in order to thrive. Western elites reject shared norms as tools of oppression. Until we square this circle, no uptick in economic indicators is going to move the happiness meter.
I'm not romanticizing anything, just pointing out that culturally heterogenous societies in general exhibit low trust both interpersonally and institutionally. It's hardly original to notice that people are happiest among others who broadly see the world the same way they do. Bill Bishop wrote a whole book about this called The Big Sort.
To your specific point about women, let me give you an example. We spent 20 years trying to bring Western, Millian liberalism to Afghanistan. As Peter van Buren and others have chronicled, much of that revolved around convincing Afghan women that what they wanted most in the world was to wear miniskirts and own businesses. Outside of a handful of highly Westernized, urban women in Kabul, we utterly failed. Why do you think that was? Are Afghans just stupid, incapable of seeing the value of Western liberalism? Or might Afghan women prefer to live in a society with broadly shared cultural norms, enforced in law, and rooted in Islamic teaching? Might they even be willing to live with the oppression of the Taliban to get that? I don't know the answer, but it's clear that Afghanis prefer something other than "my rights only end at your nose" liberalism. Even the women.
It was a Republican president and a 9/11-traumatized electorate that put our military forces there. Waving the bloody shirt in the 2002 midterms gave us Iraq.
Why does the party of the President who started it matter? It went on for 20 years through 4 Presidents of both parties. The failure of Afghanistan is completely bipartisan. In fact, i would argue it's largely a-partisan, since neither party ever realized where we went wrong. Even today, I'm not sure they do.
Because George W. Bush politically benefitted from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which were supposed to be the centerpiece of his presidency. The GOP beat the midterm malaise in 2002 by banging the war drums and solidified control over all branches of government, and got the Iraq war out of it in 2003. Bush's "war president" branding allowed him to handwave the press, critics and Democrats over not only the trajectory of the war, but also his polarizing domestic proposals and closeness to energy industry insiders and fundamentalists to the levers of power.
You're right. Bush was wrong. Maybe he meant well with his Wilsonian "democracy promotion". Maybe he was a cold, cynical bastard out to enrich himself (like Biden appears to have been in Ukraine and China). I just don't care because laying blame gets in the way of dealing with the problem: we have utterly failed to win the "hearts and minds" of every group of people we have tried to "liberate" over the last 70 years. Why is that? Why are people rejecting the "freedom" we're selling? Those aren't questions that can be addressed through a partisan lens. The very fact that both parties are clueless / oblivious to this problem implies that the problem is something they have in common. I believe that hidden commonality is Enlightenment / Millian liberalism, an ideology which animates the WEIRDs (Western, Educated, Rich, Industrialized, Democratic) but appalls most of the rest of the world.
We need all hands on deck to deal with our problems right now, and you're stuck on the problems from 20 years ago. Yes, there were some villains and some heroes. Yes, there were some mistakes. And considering the GOP was in power, they probably made more of them than the Dems. Now come back to the present so we can start solving the problems we have today.
Yes, it's definitely the women who decided the Talibans had to win, not the wavering American commitment and the Afghan state ineptitude.
I really don't even understand how somebody can be some unfamiliar with the whole human history to confidently attribute victory in war to popularity, and with a disenfranchised sector of the population nonetheless!
No offense but bunching people into convenient categories of conservatives and liberals is what gets us into the entire extremist mess where both sides are essentially looking to cancel the other instead of finding a middle ground which would be more meaningful then either extreme most of the time.
Brian makes a good argument - western style democracy has failed everywhere but in USA and parts of western Europe. Obama with perfectly good intentions tried to ram it down ME and Africa in the Arab spring, and the places he succeeded like Libya have gone from livable country ruled by a dictator to unlivable hellhole. Ditto all the attempts to change regimes in South America and Iran.
Why this has happened (while not relevant to Noah's blog here) is worth examining. What Brian suggested on cultural homogeneity is one possibility. My personal view is that for this style of democracy to thrive you need strong supporting institutions like a strong legal system, a neutral media sector, that can balance the chaos that greater democracy brings vis a vis the older monarchy / dictator / strongman model. If you don't have the institutions you are probably better off without the same level of freedom, even if it is morally attractive
Something that gets lost in the inflation-wages discourse is that the increase in real wages is concentrated in the lower levels of the income distribution. I'm salaried and earning a middle class, professional income, and I'm not as well off as I was in the Obama-Trump economy or during the pandemic. It turns out that as much as we talked about how much we wanted the income distribution and wealth to be more equal, us liberal professionals kind of liked all the cheap service labor that was available during the 2010s! We went to restaurants whenever we wanted and took Ubers all over the place, and now we have to be kind of conscious of how we spend money and change our habits to meet budget goals! And guess which class is writing editorials about how terrible everything in the economy is?
Just something that pisses me off about young Americans in the upper half of the income distribution. Many of us aren't as rich as our parents were at our age, and we have confronted crises in the past fifteen years that no one really prepared us for, but we really don't have it that bad at all. Our disposable income is greater than nearly every other country. Possibly unpopular opinion - I think another major difference between 2023 and 1984 is frankly that a lot of voters in 1984 had lived through truly hard times - the Great Depression, WWII/Korea - and had some fortitude that we don't really anymore.
I think the real grievances are just the dual psychological hangover of the pandemic and housing costs.
Average is not typical. Try incorporating just about any measure of income or wealth inequality into your analysis (FRED's Share of Total Net Worth Held by the Top 1% is an easy place to start). Also, consider this: Is it possible that inequality makes *no* difference in public sentiment? I lot of serious people think not. A lot of other, very angry people also think not, btw.
Good news that inequality is steadily decreasing then! What else did you expect when wage growth is concentrated in the bottom earners and the stock market plunges exactly?
Let's face it, a lot (not all of course) of the negative sentiment just comes from people who were not low wage workers, and now are mad that they have to pay the higher wages for those gaining on top of inflation. Guess how big of a megaphone do techbros compared to baristas?
Lots of choices on Substack but you manage to convey important ideas with remarkable skill. Lots of graphs and statistics and a wonderful read. My sense is Reagan (and Thatcher) at pivot points of dissatisfaction snatched neoliberalism from the ash heap of history where it rightly belonged. It had delivered econoomic and social instability and nearly destroyed the first world in the previous 100+ years. I think we came to the fork in the road and took the road less traveled. I also believe the democracies we fashioned in Germany and Japan were genuinely Democracy 2.0 -- When the key moment of choosing the road to pursue, we chose the moribund neoliberalism when we could have embraced social democracy that worked so well and we guided in the building of. I believe Bidenomics is Democracy 2.0 -- the turn we missed in 1980. Further validation of my thesis -- look no further than the asinine path Britain went with North Sea Oil and what it has wrought. Equinox (formerly Statoil) and the Norwegian sovereign fund is objectively better in every way. Same boundary conditions. One system of thinking delivered misery while the other delivered stability. This is what Democracy 2.0 looks like. The Brits and Americans chose the road less traveled. A shaky democracy 45 years later is the result.
Data suggest that people’s views of the state of the economy are strongly influenced by their political affiliation: when the incumbent President is a Democrat, Republicans take a much dimmer view of the economy; conversely for Democrats. I suspect that such polarisation was less pronounced at the time of President Reagan, but I do not know whether there are data to back this up. At the same time the steady rise in the share of non-affiliated voters should be helping President Borden’s re-election efforts, if the encouraging figures on the objective state of the economy hold or improve.
This is why Americans have trouble believing "Happy days are here again” in 2023.
People believed Ronald Reagan was right in 1984, because they had seen three solid years of economic upturn.
Americans have only seen one year of upturn in 2023, and they are still recovering from PSTD from a number of crises: COVID, political turmoil, as well as the economy. While the hangover headache is still throbbing, you're not going to feel positive about much of anything.
Why Noah can't understand this is puzzling to me. He tends to live in his charts and doesn't seem to view events in the light of their antecedents which set the public mood.
Noah glosses over this, but men report being much happier when they're married or in stable partnerships, and have better self-reported health and ultimately live longer. You can cite all the economic data you want, but people see the world through the prism of their own experiences. The gender divide in political support has only widened, and Trump's support is drawn overwhelmingly from men, especially non college educated men. This is a bit of a chicken or an egg problem, men who are married or dating someone probably have qualities that women want in a relationship, but nobody is born embodying these qualities, they have to learnt from other people, and it's probably going to have to be other men. For people pining for the "good old days", the dating market has changed in such a way that the economic coercion that women faced to get married dosen't exist anymore. I don't know what the answer is, but a society that has lots of unattached men, is going to be fertile soil for anti-democratic movements and demagogues. Someone brought up Mill's conception of human liberty earlier, and maximal human autonomy and unlimited choice(Tinder, Instagram, Pornhub) but taken to an extreme, leads to an atomized society with deeply unhappy people.
"Stiffed" by Susan Faludi covers this is great detail. The midcentury, Fordist economy needed the physical labor of young and middle-aged men in a way that developed economies just don't anymore. Miners, factory workers, longshoremen, truckers, sailors, soldiers, etc. were well paid professions without real barriers to entry with masculine social cultures that lots of men were very comfortably being situated in. Now the alpha male archetype is the well-educated, individualistic entrepreneur or high earning professional, which most men can't or don't want to be. I think the task is that these men have to figure out how to restore the old masculine camaraderie and sense of purpose that went with deindustrialization in a world where they (thankfully) no longer have the specific type of advantage that they used to over women.
The NYT did a podcast on this a few months ago, where they summarize and discuss Richard Reeves book Of Boys And Men, and you can find the link below if you're interested. It turns out that girls have done better in school for over 100 years, as long as we have data on academic performance, but nobody cared because women didn't go to college, and there were paths to prosperity for young men without continuing with school. It is true that boys do get diagnosed with learning disabilities at higher rates than girls, but no reputable researcher that I know of has found differences in intellectual aptitude relating to school that would account for the difference in grades. My personal opinion for the difference is girls are more compliant, will do the homework and the busywork, but the boys are less agreeable, mature later, and doing well in school is seen as something girls do or is unmasculinate.
The fact the GINI coefficient keeps climbing despite stagflation, political disruptions like Trump and J6, a global pandemic, a global financial crisis and the Great Recession is the problem.
The chart also allows you to compare over time the same measure for other countries like in Europe whose coefficients have barely moved in a generation (although post-COVID and post-Ukraine have been getting worse accounting for labor disruptions there).
You actually have to move the needle on that coefficient to the point people can actually see it in their daily lives. Given that it has been going on for 40+ years, you have a very large hill to climb.
The chart ends in 2020 (during the period when the federal government sent out all of the support and UI checks). The number has climbed back to its pre-COVID levels after the federal support ended. So no because 2020 was a fluke.
A more accurate statement would be it's lower than before COVID but not lower than at the peak of federal aid during COVID in 2020. The sheer amount of aid was enormous relative to typical income at the bottom (much of the one-time checks, UI, student loan payment moratorium, rent stabilization, expansion of food stamps, Medicaid and other federal programs went to lower paid service workers). So there's been more income growth at the bottom since 2021 but even that wouldn't be comparable to the loss of all those transfer payments or stopgaps.
It's better but it's not near where it was before the Financial Crisis and Great Recession let alone the 1990s.
In 1984, the oppositional political party used some tactics to bring Reagan's sunny picture down, but today's GOP has taken this resistance to "putting the stick in the bike wheel" levels. That's one notable difference.
. . . "after the coup attempt, the riots, the street battles, 'cancel culture', and the surge in crime." It was not a coup attempt, much less the oft-trumpeted "armed insurrection" . . . and those fomenting or at least ignoring if not cheering the riots, street battles, cancel culture, and surge in crime are from the left. And we will not be "moving on from that" as long as the same people who caused the disruption are still running the show.
It was a coup attempt, as the 800 convictions support, including those for seditious conspiracy. It was a coup attempt as the recent indictment of Trump (and eventual indictments of 6 unnamed co-conspirators) attests.
As to cancel culture, that's all coming from the GOP at this point (censoring speech, banning books, limiting education).
Where are the riots in the streets? Do you mean the neo-Nazis strutting in the streets, or those carrying Confederate flags and guns, calling for the FBI to be dismantled?
At least be truthful...
Can you give an example of a single progressive who has been cancelled by GOP?
As a lifelong liberal, I basically don't speak anymore except in dim corners of the internet like this one for fear I might say the Wrong Thing™️ :)
Kathleen McElroy
A professor with a botched hiring (they never pulled the job offer) gets $1 million dollars without suing anyone, keeps her current job, the person responsible resigns, and the school publicly apologizes.
If that's getting cancelled where do I sign up. :)
My earlier comment was in large part rhetorical, of course there are two sides to this, I just think (as a liberal) the idea that the GOP is out cancelling the left is satire.
Whataboutism at it's finest. The attack on the capitol was unprecedented in history. Maybe when the British burned the White House compares. Do you remember the summer of 1968?
[Thermidor Reaction has entered the chat.]
My dad had a pharmacy on 79 st and Ashland in Chicago, an Irish-American neighborhood, race relations were ok. Until Dr. King was assassinated. Riots swept through, and my dad's store was spared, but the neighborhood totally changed. After being robbed twice in a month he locked the doors and walked away.
Slaw, the modal insurrectionist is a status-anxious asshole boss.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/06/trump-capitol-insurrection-january-6-insurrectionists-great-replacement-white-nationalism/?fbclid=IwAR1LoTb9ehe4AFW5igI0TlU6tLJIWj_DKc0_PW8OGtiQzPgDvB5j_3XFUsQ
They're not little enough. Not only do they, in the words of author John Scalzi, get to play life at the lowest difficulty setting, they also need cheat codes to get past every stage.
If they were black, the Capitol Police would have as 30 mm chain guns mowing them down. I'm outta here.
Remember when Biden told BLM and Antifa to “fight like hell or you won’t have a country any more?” Me neither.
Agree 100%. And you cannot measure the despair many of us feel as fellow Americans pronounce their disdain for our history and culture, praising thuggery and expressing contempt for law enforcement
Yes, but it Republicans politicians who "pronounce their disdain for our history and culture, praising thuggery and expressing contempt for law enforcement" and they are the one that are most unhappy. Seem odd!
Do you mean Trump? He is constantly showing distain for law enforcement and embracing and praising thuggery.
Of course, any good American thinks slavery a despicable part of our history. But there are
areas to celebrate in order to keep perspective.
The attempted coup wasn't only, or even mainly, on the steps of the Capital: as we now know it was centered in the Oval Office from where it sought to spread to the great offices of state, the capitals of the States, and those charged with running the machinery of democracy.
Yes, you are correct that it is an epistemological question. Assuming you are a person of good will (putting aside the ad hominem snark of your response), then we are both watching the same events on the same screen . . . but seeing two completely different movies. One of us is obviously closer to seeing reality than the other . . . but how we together figure out the truth of the matter is the hard part. I am pretty sure, though, that petty snarkiness is not the way.
And, as in the last essay by Noah attempting to show how well off our economy is, the problem of our national debt is not even mentioned. Due to my work, I move in circles from corporate executives, small business owner, tech startups, tradesmen to retirees and there is a nagging concern from all of them that our level of debt is unsustainable and that much of the money being spent is wasted. I know no one who honestly believes that their children's lives will be a little bit better than their own and that is the cloud casting a pall over every other consideration.
Add Depreciation of infrastructure and Depletion of easy to access natural resources to Debt. Sorry Noah you missed the 3Ds. They are coming for all of us!
Regan pulled the wool over many people’s eyes. Being president was his greatest acting role.
Here are two examples of how many of today’s problems are directly related to his sly shenanigans:
Sundial (Northridge, Los Angeles, Calif.) 1966-10-14 - Daily Sundial - CSUN University Library Digital Collections: A. S. President John Cagle, along with 14 student leaders from Southern California have come out against gubematorial candidate Ronald Reagan's proposal to charge tuition in the State's colleges and universities.
https://digital-collections.csun.edu/digital/collection/Sundial/id/4687/rec/510
The Great Eliminator: How Ronald Reagan Made Homelessness Permanent -
https://www.sfweekly.com/archives/the-great-eliminator-how-ronald-reagan-made-homelessness-permanent/article_92c9b2ac-e881-502a-ae9d-5266cac03404.html
Yawn.
Excellent article. I lived through that era as well and despised the ad. Morning in America had quite a lot more to do with national confidence in the ability of political leadership to take us further away from where we had been in 1980 -- paralysis with Iran, inability to handle Soviet aggression, and the galling aimlessness of the 70s. The economic reality was that deindustrialization was well underway. Two other big differences between then and today: (1) national debt is substantially higher across all metrics than it was then, and moderate, sane voters know there is a reckoning ahead for us in one form or another, and (2) a majority of respondents to polls today would be unrecognizable to adults in the 80s - either complete reality-deniers who will say and believe anything to reelect Trump (40% or so of all respondents), and another 25-30% of respondents who are socialists and who, without basis, expect equal outcomes and endless government spending and who remain convinced that our country is fundamentally racist, our economy rigged, and our politics run by wealthy elites. Why else would we expect these respondents to tell us they think things are going well?
Interesting to see that consumer sentiment and general satisfaction seem to follow along the same path relatively well until 2010-2020 where consumer sentiment climbs but satisfaction flatlines. Perhaps supporting the idea that its not necessarily economic reasons behind recent dissatisfaction.
Also, I think the proportion of income spent on mortgage servicing is a better indicator of housing affordability rather that just the mortgage rate. House prices have risen quickly over the past decade meaning that many household spend as much or more of their income on mortgage repayments despite the lower interest rates.
Inflation is popular to talk about. But inflation is the first derivative of prices, and prices is what actually matters to people. Nominal prices probably look like a fairly smooth increase in the Reagen years but look pretty flat with a sudden jump recently.
Noah is a hammer looking for nails.
As long as you're confining your analysis to overall economic measurements, you will be mystified by the disconnect between American GDP and happiness. But most of Maslowe's hierarchy of needs isn't purchasable. Once you're not starving and freezing, most of what drives human happiness is social and cultural, not economic (just look at Maslowe's list.)
That's how a society with soaring GDP numbers can be so miserable. We're doing well financially (at least the top 30% are, the not-college-educated not so much), but our social and cultural stability is collapsing. What makes people happy is being able to raise families with reasonable economic security, in a peaceful society, within a broadly shared moral order. This applies to essentially EVERYONE in the world, no mater their standard of living or nationality.
The problem is that Mill's modern liberalism corrodes that shared moral order in the name of ensuring maximal individual autonomy. He admits this in On Liberty -- tearing down all constraints on human action (other than harm to others) is his admitted agenda. However, a society that agrees on nothing except "my rights only end at your nose" is probably only appealing to libertarian economists.
Most people need shared moral and cultural and social commitments in order to thrive. Western elites reject shared norms as tools of oppression. Until we square this circle, no uptick in economic indicators is going to move the happiness meter.
I'm not romanticizing anything, just pointing out that culturally heterogenous societies in general exhibit low trust both interpersonally and institutionally. It's hardly original to notice that people are happiest among others who broadly see the world the same way they do. Bill Bishop wrote a whole book about this called The Big Sort.
To your specific point about women, let me give you an example. We spent 20 years trying to bring Western, Millian liberalism to Afghanistan. As Peter van Buren and others have chronicled, much of that revolved around convincing Afghan women that what they wanted most in the world was to wear miniskirts and own businesses. Outside of a handful of highly Westernized, urban women in Kabul, we utterly failed. Why do you think that was? Are Afghans just stupid, incapable of seeing the value of Western liberalism? Or might Afghan women prefer to live in a society with broadly shared cultural norms, enforced in law, and rooted in Islamic teaching? Might they even be willing to live with the oppression of the Taliban to get that? I don't know the answer, but it's clear that Afghanis prefer something other than "my rights only end at your nose" liberalism. Even the women.
It was a Republican president and a 9/11-traumatized electorate that put our military forces there. Waving the bloody shirt in the 2002 midterms gave us Iraq.
Why does the party of the President who started it matter? It went on for 20 years through 4 Presidents of both parties. The failure of Afghanistan is completely bipartisan. In fact, i would argue it's largely a-partisan, since neither party ever realized where we went wrong. Even today, I'm not sure they do.
Because George W. Bush politically benefitted from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which were supposed to be the centerpiece of his presidency. The GOP beat the midterm malaise in 2002 by banging the war drums and solidified control over all branches of government, and got the Iraq war out of it in 2003. Bush's "war president" branding allowed him to handwave the press, critics and Democrats over not only the trajectory of the war, but also his polarizing domestic proposals and closeness to energy industry insiders and fundamentalists to the levers of power.
You're right. Bush was wrong. Maybe he meant well with his Wilsonian "democracy promotion". Maybe he was a cold, cynical bastard out to enrich himself (like Biden appears to have been in Ukraine and China). I just don't care because laying blame gets in the way of dealing with the problem: we have utterly failed to win the "hearts and minds" of every group of people we have tried to "liberate" over the last 70 years. Why is that? Why are people rejecting the "freedom" we're selling? Those aren't questions that can be addressed through a partisan lens. The very fact that both parties are clueless / oblivious to this problem implies that the problem is something they have in common. I believe that hidden commonality is Enlightenment / Millian liberalism, an ideology which animates the WEIRDs (Western, Educated, Rich, Industrialized, Democratic) but appalls most of the rest of the world.
We need all hands on deck to deal with our problems right now, and you're stuck on the problems from 20 years ago. Yes, there were some villains and some heroes. Yes, there were some mistakes. And considering the GOP was in power, they probably made more of them than the Dems. Now come back to the present so we can start solving the problems we have today.
Yes, it's definitely the women who decided the Talibans had to win, not the wavering American commitment and the Afghan state ineptitude.
I really don't even understand how somebody can be some unfamiliar with the whole human history to confidently attribute victory in war to popularity, and with a disenfranchised sector of the population nonetheless!
No offense but bunching people into convenient categories of conservatives and liberals is what gets us into the entire extremist mess where both sides are essentially looking to cancel the other instead of finding a middle ground which would be more meaningful then either extreme most of the time.
Brian makes a good argument - western style democracy has failed everywhere but in USA and parts of western Europe. Obama with perfectly good intentions tried to ram it down ME and Africa in the Arab spring, and the places he succeeded like Libya have gone from livable country ruled by a dictator to unlivable hellhole. Ditto all the attempts to change regimes in South America and Iran.
Why this has happened (while not relevant to Noah's blog here) is worth examining. What Brian suggested on cultural homogeneity is one possibility. My personal view is that for this style of democracy to thrive you need strong supporting institutions like a strong legal system, a neutral media sector, that can balance the chaos that greater democracy brings vis a vis the older monarchy / dictator / strongman model. If you don't have the institutions you are probably better off without the same level of freedom, even if it is morally attractive
Something that gets lost in the inflation-wages discourse is that the increase in real wages is concentrated in the lower levels of the income distribution. I'm salaried and earning a middle class, professional income, and I'm not as well off as I was in the Obama-Trump economy or during the pandemic. It turns out that as much as we talked about how much we wanted the income distribution and wealth to be more equal, us liberal professionals kind of liked all the cheap service labor that was available during the 2010s! We went to restaurants whenever we wanted and took Ubers all over the place, and now we have to be kind of conscious of how we spend money and change our habits to meet budget goals! And guess which class is writing editorials about how terrible everything in the economy is?
Just something that pisses me off about young Americans in the upper half of the income distribution. Many of us aren't as rich as our parents were at our age, and we have confronted crises in the past fifteen years that no one really prepared us for, but we really don't have it that bad at all. Our disposable income is greater than nearly every other country. Possibly unpopular opinion - I think another major difference between 2023 and 1984 is frankly that a lot of voters in 1984 had lived through truly hard times - the Great Depression, WWII/Korea - and had some fortitude that we don't really anymore.
I think the real grievances are just the dual psychological hangover of the pandemic and housing costs.
Average is not typical. Try incorporating just about any measure of income or wealth inequality into your analysis (FRED's Share of Total Net Worth Held by the Top 1% is an easy place to start). Also, consider this: Is it possible that inequality makes *no* difference in public sentiment? I lot of serious people think not. A lot of other, very angry people also think not, btw.
Good news that inequality is steadily decreasing then! What else did you expect when wage growth is concentrated in the bottom earners and the stock market plunges exactly?
Let's face it, a lot (not all of course) of the negative sentiment just comes from people who were not low wage workers, and now are mad that they have to pay the higher wages for those gaining on top of inflation. Guess how big of a megaphone do techbros compared to baristas?
Lots of choices on Substack but you manage to convey important ideas with remarkable skill. Lots of graphs and statistics and a wonderful read. My sense is Reagan (and Thatcher) at pivot points of dissatisfaction snatched neoliberalism from the ash heap of history where it rightly belonged. It had delivered econoomic and social instability and nearly destroyed the first world in the previous 100+ years. I think we came to the fork in the road and took the road less traveled. I also believe the democracies we fashioned in Germany and Japan were genuinely Democracy 2.0 -- When the key moment of choosing the road to pursue, we chose the moribund neoliberalism when we could have embraced social democracy that worked so well and we guided in the building of. I believe Bidenomics is Democracy 2.0 -- the turn we missed in 1980. Further validation of my thesis -- look no further than the asinine path Britain went with North Sea Oil and what it has wrought. Equinox (formerly Statoil) and the Norwegian sovereign fund is objectively better in every way. Same boundary conditions. One system of thinking delivered misery while the other delivered stability. This is what Democracy 2.0 looks like. The Brits and Americans chose the road less traveled. A shaky democracy 45 years later is the result.
Thank you for reminding us that no rational accounting accounts for our preferences and behavior. It was never "just the economy, stupid".
Data suggest that people’s views of the state of the economy are strongly influenced by their political affiliation: when the incumbent President is a Democrat, Republicans take a much dimmer view of the economy; conversely for Democrats. I suspect that such polarisation was less pronounced at the time of President Reagan, but I do not know whether there are data to back this up. At the same time the steady rise in the share of non-affiliated voters should be helping President Borden’s re-election efforts, if the encouraging figures on the objective state of the economy hold or improve.
This is why Americans have trouble believing "Happy days are here again” in 2023.
People believed Ronald Reagan was right in 1984, because they had seen three solid years of economic upturn.
Americans have only seen one year of upturn in 2023, and they are still recovering from PSTD from a number of crises: COVID, political turmoil, as well as the economy. While the hangover headache is still throbbing, you're not going to feel positive about much of anything.
Why Noah can't understand this is puzzling to me. He tends to live in his charts and doesn't seem to view events in the light of their antecedents which set the public mood.
Noah glosses over this, but men report being much happier when they're married or in stable partnerships, and have better self-reported health and ultimately live longer. You can cite all the economic data you want, but people see the world through the prism of their own experiences. The gender divide in political support has only widened, and Trump's support is drawn overwhelmingly from men, especially non college educated men. This is a bit of a chicken or an egg problem, men who are married or dating someone probably have qualities that women want in a relationship, but nobody is born embodying these qualities, they have to learnt from other people, and it's probably going to have to be other men. For people pining for the "good old days", the dating market has changed in such a way that the economic coercion that women faced to get married dosen't exist anymore. I don't know what the answer is, but a society that has lots of unattached men, is going to be fertile soil for anti-democratic movements and demagogues. Someone brought up Mill's conception of human liberty earlier, and maximal human autonomy and unlimited choice(Tinder, Instagram, Pornhub) but taken to an extreme, leads to an atomized society with deeply unhappy people.
"Stiffed" by Susan Faludi covers this is great detail. The midcentury, Fordist economy needed the physical labor of young and middle-aged men in a way that developed economies just don't anymore. Miners, factory workers, longshoremen, truckers, sailors, soldiers, etc. were well paid professions without real barriers to entry with masculine social cultures that lots of men were very comfortably being situated in. Now the alpha male archetype is the well-educated, individualistic entrepreneur or high earning professional, which most men can't or don't want to be. I think the task is that these men have to figure out how to restore the old masculine camaraderie and sense of purpose that went with deindustrialization in a world where they (thankfully) no longer have the specific type of advantage that they used to over women.
The NYT did a podcast on this a few months ago, where they summarize and discuss Richard Reeves book Of Boys And Men, and you can find the link below if you're interested. It turns out that girls have done better in school for over 100 years, as long as we have data on academic performance, but nobody cared because women didn't go to college, and there were paths to prosperity for young men without continuing with school. It is true that boys do get diagnosed with learning disabilities at higher rates than girls, but no reputable researcher that I know of has found differences in intellectual aptitude relating to school that would account for the difference in grades. My personal opinion for the difference is girls are more compliant, will do the homework and the busywork, but the boys are less agreeable, mature later, and doing well in school is seen as something girls do or is unmasculinate.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3CAwNCCLNztD38bopvFa5h?si=cyQC9etOTB2b_m0SDyTWUA
I think the thing you missed is INCOME/WEALTH INEQUALITY.
The GINI coefficient in the U.S. is much worse today than it was in 1984:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=US
The fact the GINI coefficient keeps climbing despite stagflation, political disruptions like Trump and J6, a global pandemic, a global financial crisis and the Great Recession is the problem.
The chart also allows you to compare over time the same measure for other countries like in Europe whose coefficients have barely moved in a generation (although post-COVID and post-Ukraine have been getting worse accounting for labor disruptions there).
You actually have to move the needle on that coefficient to the point people can actually see it in their daily lives. Given that it has been going on for 40+ years, you have a very large hill to climb.
GINI is falling - does that cause you to change your mind?
The chart ends in 2020 (during the period when the federal government sent out all of the support and UI checks). The number has climbed back to its pre-COVID levels after the federal support ended. So no because 2020 was a fluke.
It is still falling. The recent salary increase have mostly gone to the lower end.
A more accurate statement would be it's lower than before COVID but not lower than at the peak of federal aid during COVID in 2020. The sheer amount of aid was enormous relative to typical income at the bottom (much of the one-time checks, UI, student loan payment moratorium, rent stabilization, expansion of food stamps, Medicaid and other federal programs went to lower paid service workers). So there's been more income growth at the bottom since 2021 but even that wouldn't be comparable to the loss of all those transfer payments or stopgaps.
It's better but it's not near where it was before the Financial Crisis and Great Recession let alone the 1990s.
In 1984, the oppositional political party used some tactics to bring Reagan's sunny picture down, but today's GOP has taken this resistance to "putting the stick in the bike wheel" levels. That's one notable difference.