Anywhere else he’d be a chump…
If there’s one thing that characterizes this election season so far it’s the fact that the country remains as polarized as it’s been these last few years and both sides are very upset. But nobody seems to be able to figure out exactly why. Is it inflation or the media or the pandemic or too much doomscrolling or something else? There are plenty of theories but no consensus, at least not yet.
The most common explanation is that the economy is bringing everyone down. It’s hard to explain why people are so negative about it since the numbers are actually quite robust with the job market being the best it’s been since the 1960s and wages rising rapidly, especially for the people in the middle and working classes. For the first time in decades the gains in this economy are flowing to them instead of the upper 1%.
Here’s Sen. J.D. Vance lying about this on Fox News along with a graph showing the reality (which Fox viewers will never see.)
Inflation is often cited as the main reason for Americans’ dissatisfaction, mainly because only the older folks have ever experienced a sharp rise in prices before (the last time was in the late 70s and early 80s) so it came as a shock when the pandemic introduced it. People seem to have expected that when inflation eased prices would go back down to where they were before but that’s not how it works and it wouldn’t be a good thing if it did. Deflation would result in those wage gains and new jobs going back down as well. Still, people remember what the prices of eggs were before the pandemic and are angry that they are more expensive today. But is that enough to cause this overwhelming despondency in the culture at large?
This economic discontent expressed by many Americans these days has been called a “vibecession” defined by economics writer Kyla Scanlon as “a disconnect between consumer sentiment and economic data and why people feel bad about the economy, despite the economic metrics telling them that the economy is doing OK.” As this chart points out, most people are actually feeling pretty good about their own personal finances. They just think everyone else’s are getting worse.
That disconnect isn’t just about economics. Gallup routinely polls people about their sense of satisfaction in their personal lives and the direction of the country and the same weird phenomenon exists on that question. 78% of people say they’re satisfied with the way things are going personally, a number which has been more or less steady for two decades. Only 20% express satisfaction with the direction of the country.
Since people generally seem to feel pretty good about their personal situation, this leads one to take a hard look at the media since that’s mostly where people get their view of the country at large. I think it’s fair to say that the “vibecession” was pushed pretty hard in the press for the first two years of Biden’s term which has only recently begun to present a more balanced view of the economy. And when you add that to constant stories about people being dissatisfied and despondent, it created a negative feedback loop. Even as people were feeling pretty good about their own lives they were still depressed by what they perceived as other people’s despair.
Another plausible explanation for this national funk is the fact that the whole country just went through a once in a lifetime trauma that ended up with the deaths of well over a million people from COVID-19. Psychiatrists George Makari and Richard A. Friedman wrote in the Atlantic that we’re all dealing with unprocessed grief:
Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxiety—then, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger—exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.
I’m sure this has contributed greatly to this feeling of doom and gloom that seems to define this era of bad feelings. How could it not? But it’s hard to imagine how we could have come together to acknowledge what happened when we couldn’t even rally ourselves as a country in the midst of a major global crisis. We pretty much fell apart.
And that brings me to my own personal hypothesis about what’s bringing everyone down: it’s Donald Trump. From the moment he won the election in 2016, this country has been in a state of high anxiety. Recall that even in victory, Trump’s supporters were angry and aggressive and Trump immediately doubled down on his hostile rhetoric toward his opponents, stoking that rage. The other side reacted with the massive Women’s Marches that took place all over the world the day after the inauguration and that made them even angrier.
From that day until the insurrection on January 6th almost four years later there was never a day in which the country wasn’t on high alert because of what the president was doing whether it was a source of unmitigated joy for his followers or a source of barely restrained panic from everyone else. Scandal after scandal, bizarre embarrassing behavior in foreign capitals, reckless half-baked, inhumane policies were received by half the nation as brilliant creative destruction and the other half as careening toward disaster every single day. It culminated in a presidential performance during the pandemic that was like something out of a surreal horror film and a riot in the US Capitol.
When he finally flew off to his exile in Mar-a-Lago, I think most people, maybe even some of his followers, breathed a sigh of relief that maybe we could all take a breather. But he never went away. The angst and unease has never let up for eight long years and it’s taken a toll.
Trump and the right wing media spend all day, every day, working Republicans into a frenzy over one thing or another. Trump has made his crimes into a spectacle with him at the center of a great passion play as the Nelson Mandela of America. They have been convinced that unless Donald Trump is president this country is doomed. Most everyone else either doesn’t want to hear about it anymore or knows very well that the opposite is true.
America is in deep, deep distress right now and there’s no real mystery as to what’s causing it. It’s because of Donald Trump and the culture he created when he came down that escalator in 2015. It’s not going to get any better until he is defeated. If he isn’t, it’s going to get much, much worse.
Conservaytibes feel bad because their dear leader tells them its bad, liberals feel bad because Trump exists. It’s Trump.
