Steve Fraser, "The End of the Future"

In an interesting if ultimately irritating essay at Jacobin, Steve Fraser takes on one of my favorite questions: why are Americans so depressed about the future? Fraser is focused on politics, where no party holds out hope for anything both new and good. Conservatives, ok, one might expect them to decry change and try to reverse it. But liberals and even radicals, he argues, are the same, focused entirely on bringing back certain parts of the past. The Bernie Sanders campaign was all about brining back the New Deal. But this, says, Fraser, is not what radicalism used to be.

Historically, however, the Left was always about creating new worlds. Rather than restoring the past, it approached history as a platform for inspiring the future.

Yes, Sanders and his people realized that the New Deal had flaws, but: 

Criticizing the New Deal for its imperfections, even the most damning imperfections, is categorically different than reckoning with its vaunted achievements.

After all, what made the age a golden one — its unionized assembly line, its social security, its decent standard of living — came at a steep price: the soul-crushing monotony of that same unionized workplace; work surveilled, disciplined, and alien; political inhibition; pervasive social and sexual self-repression; bureaucracy’s iron cage (Weber’s “polar night of icy darkness”); the tutelary condescension of the social welfare apparatus; imperial domination masquerading as democracy; an insatiable appetite for consumer fantasies from which the heart grew ever more diseased; and an enervating decomposition of the social organism and its replacement by a narcissistic, anomic individualism. The New Deal was a peace treaty that, like many such settlements, left the underlying causes of war unresolved. 

If the New Deal was born, in part, out of revolutionary desires, resuscitating its corpse won’t rekindle those aspirations. Only a vibrant anticipation of a wholly new way of life, a renewal of the future, can do that. But the future is dead. How did that happen?

The answer, says Fraser, is that "capitalism" killed the future. This is an interesting point of view, but I'm not buying it. Fraser admits that capitalism had a big part in creating our longing for an ever brighter future. But capitalism has changed, he says, becoming that dreaded thing, "neoliberalism."

What is commonly referred to as neoliberalism might better be characterized from a materialist standpoint as the era of deindustrialization and disaccumulation, as an asset-bubble economy with little in the way of productive investment.

This kind of thing makes me crazy. Capitalism has many flaws, but a lack of "productive investment" is not one of them. Who created the personal computer? The internet? The cellular phone? Yes, all of these things relied on basic research funded by the government, but private firms have invested multiple trillions of dollars in these industries. Who is building solar and wind farms at such a staggering rate? Private companies; according to the White House, private investment in green energy and associated manufacturing has been half a trillion dollars since 2021. (They would be building even more if local governments were not fighting so hard to stop them.) Who is building electric cars? Efficient heat pumps? LED light bulbs? Who is experimenting with fusion reactors? And, sorry, if you don't think those things are "productive" in the same sense as steel mills, you're just a deranged tankie.

And then there is the question of "deindustrialization":

Deindustrialization was not only destructive but demoralizing. Whole ways of life went under. Industries, unions, towns, churches, fraternal societies, main-street businesses, local hospitals, schoolhouses, community centers, movie theaters, and dozens of social gathering places from restaurants to bowling alleys all died away or lingered on as ghostly remains. Beginning in the late 1990s, what one book has called “deaths of despair” became an epidemic. These fatalities from suicides, or suicides by drugs and alcohol-saturated livers, occurred disproportionately among middle-aged white people, those supposed beneficiaries of Progress: mainly working class, lacking higher education, often out of work, fearful of new information-age technologies, downwardly mobile, coming from failed marriages and broken families and shrinking social support networks.

Which, fine, it is true that many Americans are suffering, and that many communities are dying. But if you think struggling people and dying communities are new problems, you should learn more about the nineteenth century. And if you think the US is "de-industrializing," I invite you to glance at the graph of industrial production shown above. American manufacturing is booming. True, it is not the same as it was before; the labor intensive parts have mostly moved to Asia or Mexico, and what remains employs ever fewer workers. But manufacturing employs fewer workers everywhere in the world. And if you think we should be doing something to keep coal miners mining, like the Germans do, sorry, I disagree.

I simply don't buy simple economic explanations of our problems. The American economy is doing really well, better over the past 25 years than almost all other rich nations. Yes, a lot of our jobs suck, but as Fraser admits, lots of old industrial jobs sucked, too, and those jobs were a lot more dangerous than ours are. But in the US we have deaths of despair and Italy, where there has been no meaningful economic growth in a generation, does not.

I found this more interesting, about the failure of liberalism:

Liberalism, as it morphed into neoliberalism, had betrayed itself by abandoning the future. As Christopher Lasch pointed out decades ago, this entailed giving up on its own humanist tradition, its point d’honneur and the basis of its legitimacy in favor of an ill-kept promise to deliver the goods. It had become its own refutation; at once cheering on an extremist individualism, wreaking havoc here, there, and everywhere in the name of freedom, while simultaneously bemoaning the loss of community and the family that its own imperatives made inevitable.

I think there is something to this, and I would say that the sad demise of clubs and bowling leagues that Fraser blames on "deindustrialization" owes more to this than to economic changes. Not that I am blaming liberalism for this; MAGA might be the most hyper-individualist mass movement in history.

But if we are suffering from "extremist individualism," what are we supposed to do about that? Ban social media? Jail the Kardashians? 

And how would socialism help?

I still think all of this misses the basic point, which is the ocean of misery that seems to me woefully under-motivated. At Jacobin they devote a lot of energy to arguing that the problem of global warming doesn't change the basic economic issue they want to focus on, the need for socialism; besides "neoliberalism," the main idea they attack is "green capitalism." But it seems to me that saying we are doomed under capitalism is the same as saying we are doomed, period, because we are not going to have socialism. 

I think people like the writers at Jacobin are part of the reason we are so depressed about the future. Just like environmental doomsters and MAGA ranters, they fulminate nonstop about how bad things are, about how even things that actually look good on the surface are really disastrous underneath. THAT, to me, is precisely the problem, the unwillingness of any major group of contemporary intellectuals to see that the glass is half full. I don't think Fraser has an explanation for why that is so.