Paul Krugman is retiring as a regular NY Times columnist. In his last column, he reflects on how much America has changed since he took the job in 2000:
What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.
It’s hard to convey just how good most Americans were feeling in 1999 and early 2000. Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that looks surreal by today’s standards.
I agree with this. In fact I was so bemused by the level of optimism (me! the resident optimist!) that a friend and I started designing a series of "Real History" quarters that would showcase the dark side of the American past. Like, California would have the internment of Japanese Americans, Tennessee the Fort Pillow Massacre, Virginia the Second Powhatan War, Kentucky the Hatfields and McCoys, West Virginia the coal field wars, etc.
Anyway.
Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.
It was not always thus. Back in 2002 and ’03, those of us who argued that the case for invading Iraq was fundamentally fraudulent received a lot of pushback from people refusing to believe that an American president would do such a thing. Who would say that now?
In a different way, the financial crisis of 2008 undermined any faith the public had that governments knew how to manage economies. The euro as a currency survived the European crisis that peaked in 2012, which sent unemployment in some countries to Great Depression levels, but trust in Eurocrats — and belief in a bright European future — didn’t.
It’s not just governments that have lost the public’s trust. It’s astonishing to look back and see how much more favorably banks were viewed before the financial crisis.
Obviously there is something to this, but I think this contrast (which you see all over, not just from Krugman) is way overblown.
I remember the 1970s: stagflation, the rust belt, people paying $5 to take sledegehammer whacks at Japanese cars, widespread fear of environmental poisons. In the 1960s we had the Vietnam War and a vast rebellion against the state's wisdom, hippies and their attack on bourgeois life, terrorists who set off far more bombs than we saw in the 90s or have seen lately. I could go on, but I really don't think there was ever an era when Americans had great trust in experts.
The places I see the biggest change are in the media and in government. In the era of three, highly-regulated TV networks and powerful newspapers the press did a lot of pretending to be neutral and above the fray. There were highly partisan media but they were pretty obscure; one of my friends in middle school came from a family of cranky libertarians and they subscribed to mimeographed newsletters sent through the mail. The big first crack in the wall came with AM talk radio, Rush Limbaugh and so on. Then Fox News, then the internet.
To the extent that people ever did respect our leaders, it was partly because the dominant media worked hard to create that respect.
The change within Congress has been equally profound. I see this starting with Newt Gingrich in the 90s, a new breed of legislators who cared only about fighting for their side, nothing set aside for respect of the Halls of Congress or whatever.
It may be that the respectful America I grew up in was a unique product of the Cold War and the post-World War II boom, doomed to eventual collapse. Congress was often an ugly place in the nineteenth century, and Yellow Journalism was a real thing. Maybe we're just living through regression to the mean.
Krugman:
So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there. At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises. And at that point the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.
Maybe.
6 comments:
"I really don't think there was ever an era when Americans had great trust in experts."
I think the question is, which Americans, and which experts. It looks to me like people define certain persons as "expert," trustworthy, and worthy to be listened to, on the basis of signals such as whether one likes what the "expert" says and whether they identify with that person in terms of comportment, verbal and other forms of style, etc. Some people trust academic degrees as a credential, and some trust rejection by the establishment--but both are forms of credentialing as such. It's just that different credentials are respected, basically for what they say about the person claiming them. For a lot of people, isn't Mehmet Oz a sort of expert? Ditto for Pete Hegseth, no? A good man, a good Christian, a veteran. Rejecting military brass who signal a resistance to MAGA in some way strikes me less as about rejecting or accepting experts and/or institutional authority as such and more about partisan loyalties--and the same, of course, goes in reverse for liberals and their embrace of "constitutional" generals.
I'm very struck that polls of Trump voters seem to indicate that they now feel quite a bit of optimism about government and the future.
In any case, admiration for various forms of elite credentialing, it seems to me, go way back in this country, whether we're talking about genealogies in a place like Virginia or ministerial credentials in some New England congregations. By the same token, of course, rejection of such credentials goes way back, too, including, for example, trusting rebel prophet types over academic ministers.
The 90'S saw the Clinton administration balance the budget and actually create a surplus. The stock market almost tripled. Other countries were in awe and started using the US economy as a template. Then? Dubya Bush came and insisted on giving Americans a tax rebate, squandered our wealth on a wild goose chase in Iraq trying to kill Saddam Hussein and probably on a personal quest restore his fathers tarnished reputation. The beginning of the end of our prosperity.
@Kpoog
I'm certainly not advocating for Hegseth. I'm trying to emphasize factional antagonism and mirroring over what I think is the myth of qualities that "Americans" share.
"The stock market almost tripled."
It seemed like you could hang the stock pages from the New York times on a wall, play Pin-The-Tail-On-The-Stock, invest in whatever stock you pinned, and almost be guaranteed you'd make money. Fun times.
My brother thinks "W" went after Saddam because it was believed Saddam tried to kill "H.W." Terrible times. I thought his second term would never end. U.S. foreign policy is in tatters today, too. That's what we get for voting in a Cold War Warrior -- a blast from the past.
I've long argued that we're in the Second Gilded Age. Unfortunately, that implies that we're only getting out of for similar reasons to why we got out of the first one.
I fear it's going to have to get rather bad for the average person - and perhaps even require a WWI level global catastrophe to happen and another Great Depression level economic collapse - before people decide enough is enough and put support behind Progressives who are willing to offer an even newer version of the "New Deal", where we are once again promised sanity and stability.
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