To me, this account of a sclerotic, backward-looking present leaves out a lot of discombobulating change, both within politics and without: a green industrial revolution unfolding and animating the Democratic Party agenda; the rapid transformation of the Republican Party into a shape-shifting cult of personality; the rapid development of a miracle vaccine and an incipient golden age for medicine, heralding great hopes for obesity and cancer and cystic fibrosis, among many other advances; the arrival of A.I., with all its attendant anxiety and hype; a new horizon for civil rights and some radical social experimentation around the meaning of gender identity; and a cohort of techno-optimists obsessed with accelerating the pace of progress, some of them so obsessed with the principle, they’re willing to discard the guardrails of liberalism along the way.
But as a measure of mood and political rhetoric, the stagnation diagnosis fits much better. As the imaginative and spiritual lives of Americans have become increasingly preoccupied with partisan politics, and as those politics have grown increasingly hostile and zero-sum, we’ve come to see the future in increasingly bleak and zero-sum terms, as well. Joe Biden’s State of the Union invocations of an American comeback aside the basic vibe, across the political spectrum, is pretty glum and exhausted.
You can see the gloom in poll after poll documenting Americans’ declining faith in their country, its politics and its future. But the phenomenon is probably more visible on the vocal margins than at the dour median, with vocal “doomers” about A.I. and climate change, long Covid and Covid vaccines, fertility levels and the “woke mind virus,” among other sources of panic. And there is now another emerging archetype: doomers about doomerism, who believe that pessimism is a kind of social poison, and that bleak visions of the future have probably already curdled our culture and its prospects, and may consign future generations to worse outcomes still.
For some, hoping to jump-start a new age of technological optimism, all this pessimism looks like a maddening kind of a puzzle. The world is wealthier than it has ever been, they point out, and by many measures it is also “better,” in aggregate if not for everyone. So why are people feeling so grim about the future that they’re tempted to retreat into visions of the past?
The intuitive explanations could fill a book, and do fill the endless scroll of social media: gridlocked and gerontocratic politics, yawning income inequality and the claustrophobic housing crunch, the continuing climate crisis and the unabating epidemic of gun violence and rising rates of overdose. To that list, Fraser adds some structural history and social shortfalls characteristic of what he calls “a developed country undergoing underdevelopment”: stalled life expectancy, crumbling infrastructure, the return of child labor. (He doesn’t really discuss the rollback of reproductive rights, though that is one major reason many Americans feel shoved back into the past.)