At various points in my life, I’ve been very pessimistic about a variety of things. In 2008, it was monetary policy. Today, it’s fiscal policy and authoritarian nationalism. At the same time, I’ve never been so pessimistic that I started planning a move to Canada or New Zealand. The US remains a pretty great place to live.
Janan Ganesh has a piece in the FT that seems to criticize both the left and the right for excessive pessimism:
The 1930s are an almost useless guide to what is happening now. The strongmen back then came out of an era of scarcely precedented chaos: the great war, hyperinflation, political gangs fighting for control of the streets. Today’s demagogues emerged in a period of sustained peace and affluence. It was more or less the richest nation on Earth that elected Donald Trump in 2016, after decades of falling violent crime, and more than 40 years since its last conscript war. The Britain that voted to leave the European project had far more industrial peace and international standing than the one that first joined. As for Germany, the far right’s voting base maps almost perfectly on to the old East, which is unrecognisably richer and freer than it was at reunification.
These aren’t just different stories, then, but almost opposing ones. The lesson of the 1930s is that people who suffer — economic pain, physical fear, national territorial loss — are liable to turn to extremists. The lesson of today is that not suffering can induce them to do the same thing. After too long a period of calm, boredom sets in. The temptation to take risks with one’s vote starts to grow. Stability destabilises. The 1930s is simple to understand, as it conforms to common sense: trauma leads to anger. The real intellectual challenge is to absorb the theme of our own time, which is the perverse consequences of prolonged success.
The left wrongly thinks this is the 1930s again, with Hitler just around the corner. The right thinks this is the 1930s again, and we need a strong leader to fix the disastrous state of our society. This is from Trump’s 2017 inauguration speech:
This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
Eight years later, things had gotten even worse:
For many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair.
It’s almost like the right pretends to believe it’s 1933 all over again, with 25% unemployment, and the left pretends to believe it’s 1933 again, with the fascists taking over.
A top Trump official named Michael Anton wrote a famous essay that likened America’s situation to the ill-fated Flight 93 on 9/11. To me, our country seems more like an ordinary United Airlines flight to Chicago, full of annoyances but still a pretty amazing technological feat.
Francis Fukuyama’s book entitled The End of History has been widely criticized, mostly by people who never read it. Here’s what he actually said would happen after the end of history:
Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, they then will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
Amazing. The best description of the world of 2025 was written in 1989. It’s almost as if the internet was invented to make Fukuyama’s prophecy come true.
I am also reminded of this famous comment by Karl Marx:
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Unfortunately, excessive pessimism has consequences. The pessimist fails to realize just how many problems are faced by even the most successful societies. People start to think: “Things are so bad we need to shake things up. What do we have to lose?”
What do we have to lose? Let’s think about that phrase. Suppose we were to rank all of the world’s societies from the most to the least successful. Obviously, this list would be somewhat subjective, but I think it’s fair to say that most people would put places like Switzerland and Norway near the top, and places like North Korea, Haiti and Somalia near the bottom. Think of a scale of 1 to 100, with the most successful societies at the top. Where does the US fall on that list? Are we closer to Switzerland and Norway, or are we closer to North Korea and Haiti?
If we decide that things in America are so bad that we need to radically “shake things up”, then is it more likely that we move much higher on the list or much lower?
Imagine a car with a few small mechanical problems. If you pick up the car with a giant robot arm, and shake it wildly up and down, is it more likely that the shaking causes the broken components to fall into their correct position, or is it more likely that the car is even further damaged?
Some studies suggest that happiness is positively correlated with wealth. One possibility is that “money buys happiness”. Another possibility is that depressed people make bad decisions, and make themselves worse off.
