There are two American internet pundits that I find myself nearly always agreeing with, or at least enjoying their takes - Noah Smith and David Roberts - but they are pretty much on opposite ends of the optimism/pessimism scale.
Noah is relentlessly optimistic and cheerful, and his free Substack article today is a good example of this:
The best thing about this piece is how it points out what I've been saying for a few years about Right wing catastrophic takes on the recent state of the US (and the world) - it's just politically motivated scary campfire storytelling, ignoring completely the history of how much worse American society (and the world) were faring in the 60's to the 90's:
Most Americans are now too young to remember, but in the early 1970s
domestic terrorist attacks became so commonplace that they were
practically ignored — over a year and a half during 1971 and 1972, the
FBI counted over 2500 bombings
in the U.S. Most of these attacks didn’t kill anyone — they were just
bombs that blew up empty buildings. But imagine the hysteria if this was
happening multiple times a day in 2022! Two left-wing radicals tried to kill President Gerald Ford within a three-week period in 1976!
And people were
dying. In the late 60s and 70s, the murder rate — always much higher in
the U.S. than in other rich countries — spiked to levels not seen since
the 19th century, and stayed high until the late 90s....
The three decades from the mid-60s to the mid-90s were, simply put, a
time of violence and madness. And let’s not forget the economic
catastrophe of the late 70s stagflation, the wage stagnation between
roughly 1973 and 1993, or the double-digit unemployment rates of the
early 80s.
And as for looming catastrophes, eco-dystopias were
already starting to appear in the 70s, but the true Sword of Damocles
was nuclear war. Tens of thousands of Soviet tanks stood ready to roll
into the Fulda Gap at any moment. By the late 80s, the U.S. and USSR
were facing each other with over 60,000 nuclear weapons, many on hair-trigger alert.
Obviously, the whole "Flight 93 election" meme was just patent crap from the start - and exaggerating the effects of Trump era Left-ish protest (as if the country had never seen massive and damaging race related protest and riots before) was cynical self-gaslighting, promoted by the poisonous feedback loop of Right wing media and the Republican Party, and the stupid people all over the world who follow them.
Noah then switches to talking about the genuine crisis of climate change and whether it really is the big issue that means the world has to move towards more socialist settings to see its way through. But, given his optimism, he thinks we probably will get the problem under some sort of control:
And yet to me, it seems easily possible to imagine a future where we
don’t just muddle along with business-as-usual, but in which we do address the threat of climate change with only mild disruptions of our current way of life. The biggest reason is the advance of technology.
Renewable energy, energy storage, electric vehicles, and other green
technologies have gotten so good, and so cheap, so quickly, that the
economic incentives now favor decarbonization.
I have to say, I am somewhat inclined to that view myself. For example, I have stopped posting much about any climate change scepticism, because it is clear that the handful of contrarian scientists and their ideologically motivated supporters have been routed. There just is no longer any point in engaging with their arguments, and it's kind of pathetic watching the losers cling to their "but I'll be proved right yet!" pleas while they are ignored by serious political leadership, and only give succour by ignorant clowns.
As to whether we will get sufficient carbon emission reduction to prevent the really bad long term outcomes - my vague optimism extends to that too, even though I am dissatisfied with the current fiddling at the edges. (See my recent post - The transition to clean energy - time for specifics, isn't it??)
Yet I still feel a bit dissatisfied with Noah's column, because it doesn't address the key issue that is so concerning for the future of American (and really, global) democracy and well being - the Right wing generated "epistemic crisis" that David Roberts discusses so convincingly.
I mean, David Roberts is right in today's tweet:
It's incredibly bad that things that would have universally been considered appallingly anti-democratic, fascist worthy actions are now treated by half of the elected politicians to America as if they are just unremarkable "it's how we do business now" part of the landscape. And people will still vote for those politicians! As someone said in a tweet following:
As many have said, even worse than Trump himself is the cowardice of the Republican Party to stand up to him. But this is not mattering to voters.
I posted recently that if Right wing media is at the core of poisonous Right wing politics in America, maybe if Rupert and his son had a change of heart the turnaound in the political atmosphere could, in theory, be pretty quick? If you had a new owner announce "we will not be the network of demonisation of Democrats and centrists politics anymore - it is harming the country" and sacked all its current evening line up - how long would it take to get politics back to reason?
I know this is wildly unlikey, and perhaps short of key members of the Murdoch family going down in a plane over a volcano (we all have our dreams), it's not going to happen. Hence, the Robert's concern about the poor prospects for reasonableness in near-future American politics seems warranted, at least for the time being.
PS: another scenario for relatively rapid improvement - Trump and certain key supporters going down in civil or criminal trials. I still strongly suspect that this is what at least a significant proportion of Republican old blood are hoping for - but it remains unclear how long the heart of the party is going to be tainted by making excuses for a wannabe fascist. And I still see the Right wing media as the more crucial change needed.
Update: I have been having some further thoughts about this. In particular, as to why, when things were pretty bad in those earlier decades, people (including me) did still retain a long term optimism that feels harder to have now.
I think I have worked it out.
Yes, the United States (and the West, generally speaking) did just "putter along" out of the days of radicalism and violence of the decades of the 60's to 90's; and that does suggest that it will work its way out of the current social turbulence, too. (Which isn't, in violence terms, actually as bad as the earlier period, as Noah correctly argues.)
But the reason it feels different this time is that such a large part of the nation cannot even see that it is being radical. Because, yes, sympathy to a idiot failed President's direct attempts to have an election overturned on false and imaginary claims is a radical position! Failing to see the fascism in continual calls at rallies to have your political opponent locked up on drummed up charges, and calling all media that doesn't toe your line "the enemy of the people" is radical! Yet there is a very big part of the American population that cannot see this as so bad - or even think it is warranted.
The radicalism of Leftist terrorists in the 60's and 70's was something that the country and its media did not doubt. The Right wing radicalism that led to (say) the Oklahoma bombing was not up for dispute. The radical element in the country was small and knew it was radical. Today it is much, much larger, and really doesn't know it.
To take an example of something unique to these times: the absurd Right's vilification of expertise and wholesale belief in conspiracy means that ordinary people doing their job are under threat in a way that is really novel - see the terrible (and badly under-reported) story of election workers who have been terrorised for purely imaginary actions, and the recent report in the Washington Post about the security that Fauci now has to live through due to the perm-haired idiot of a Senator and gormless media figures like Tucker Carlson. In fact, let's quote that report:
“There
is no truth,” Fauci says, for effect. “There is no fact.” People
believe hydroxychloroquine works because an Internet charlatan claims it
does. People believe the 2020 election was stolen because a former
president says so. People believe that Fauci killed millions of people
for the good of his stock portfolio because it’s implied by TV pundits,
Internet trolls and even elected leaders. Fauci is unnerved by “the
almost incomprehensible culture of lies” that has spread among the
populace, infected major organs of the government, manifested as ghastly
threats against him and his family. His office staff, normally focused
on communicating science to the public, has been conscripted into
skirmishes over conspiracy theories and misinformation.
“It
is very, very upending to live through this,” Fauci says, seated at his
kitchen table in the midwinter light. He pauses. “I’m trying to get the
right word for it.” He is examining himself now, at 81, in the shadow
of the past two years. “It has shaken me a bit.”
The
way he can comprehend the situation is in the context of the Jan. 6,
2021, siege of the Capitol. There it was, on live TV, an experiment as
clear as day: The abandonment of truth has seismic consequences.
Something
has been replicating in the American mind. It is not microbial. It
cannot be detected by nasal swab. To treat an affliction, you must first
identify it. But you can’t slide a whole country into an MRI machine.
“There’s no diagnosis for this,” Fauci says. “I don’t know what is going on.”
Exactly.
This is what gives me pause about the nation "puttering along" out of its current state.
Which leads me to the "civil war" issue. I think Noah is sceptical of takes along those lines too, but so is David Roberts. The culture war and political fractures do tend to run along an educational and urban/rural divide, meaning that there is no realistic way the nation can be divided geographically. And, happily, because the military is led by well educated people, the danger of Trump was clear to nearly all in the Pentagon, and they were not going to support him in a ridiculous coup.
So no, the epistemic crisis is not going to lead to civil war. I suppose that is a kind of "optimism". But on the downside, it's hard to see how it can't continue leaving the country in a political paralysis on certain key issues, and weaken effective democracy. Until the Right comes to its senses, the "puttering out" of the current problems is going to be very protracted, disheartening, and potentially dangerous.
