Journal Entries #1

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A Hunger for Apocalypse

The Perils of Peace and Plenty

What a beautiful fix we are in now; peace has been declared.

—Napoleon

The problem with modernity is not that it is too hard, but that it is too easy.

—Janan Ganesh

BOREDOM AMID PLENTY

Toward the end of his time in office in 2016, U.S. president Barack Obama said to an audience

of young Europeans that people alive in the twenty-first century are more fortunate than they

realize. “It may seem improbable,” Obama said, “but it’s true.” He went on:

We are fortunate to be living in the most peaceful, most prosperous, most progressive era in

human history. That may surprise young people who are watching TV or looking at your phones

and it seems like only bad news comes through every day. But consider that it’s been decades

since the last war between major powers.

More people live in democracies. We’re wealthier and healthier and better educated, with a

global economy that has lifted up more than a billion people from extreme poverty and created

new middle classes from the Americas to Africa to Asia. Think about the health of the average

person in the world—tens of millions of lives that we now save from disease and infant

mortality, and people now living longer lives.

If you had to choose a moment in time to be born, any time in human history, and you didn’t

know ahead of time what nationality you were or what gender or what your economic status

might be, you’d choose today—which isn’t to say that there is not still enormous suffering and

enormous tragedy and so much work for us to do.1

Obama was criticized by some of his opponents as a disconnected optimist, but even some

conservative economists and policy experts who could never be mistaken for fans of the forty-

fourth president agreed with him.2

I, too, agreed with him, because the facts allow no other conclusion. Still, I can imagine someone

reading this chapter years from now—if I can flatter myself that anyone will read it at all in the

future—and wondering how I could reach the ridiculous conclusion that the early twenty-first

century was anything but an arduous time. This is, after all, a book whose pages are still made

from trees, written by an aging man soon to suffer any number of things that might one day be

curable, tapping away on keys made of toxic and eternal plastic, straining his eyes while staring

at a screen powered by fossil fuels, and hunkered down in his home during a pandemic that will

one day be only a memory.

Such critics might also snort (even now) that I had no business lecturing anyone about whether

times are good or bad. For people like me—at least as I have lived most of my adult life—times

are always good. Hunger, other than as a fleeting inconvenience, has no real meaning to me. My

home is warm and comfortable. My office is cluttered with an array of gadgets, many devoted to

leisure, including a computer that has a glass door on it for no good reason other than so that I

can see its expensive components glow in the dark. I complain about the parlous state of

democracy while being in absolutely no danger myself while exercising my right to speak, to

worship, to vote, or to write the very words you’re reading now. Add the shocking fact that my

cat has better access to health care than billions of my fellow human beings and millions of my

fellow citizens, and all of this must seem like the very happy pronouncement of a very happy

man that liberal democracy worked out just fine—for me.

It does little good, I suppose, to argue that the happiness or misery of any one person is no way

to judge a society. And yet unless we are to adopt the position of dedicated revolutionaries—that

is, to say that democracy itself is always a sham—then we need to think about whether less

categorical criticisms are rooted in some kind of real and shared experience as citizens. It is not

enough to say, as the British writer William Davies has, that “if people don’t feel safe, it doesn’t

matter whether they are objectively safe or not,” and that we must therefore “take people’s

feelings seriously as political issues, and not simply dismiss them as irrational.”3 Feelings

matter, especially as a kind of general barometer of the public mood. But feelings are an

unreliable way to know if our institutions are making life better or worse. It is never uniformly

the best of times or the worst of times, and we have to find something in between Pangloss and

panic.

Political leaders, of course, rarely have any interest in nuance or incrementalism, because “things

could be better” or “overall, we’re doing pretty well” are not particularly inspiring slogans. Even

Obama, who was later such an optimist, argued for “Hope and Change” because we were losing

hope and things needed changing; Donald Trump (and Ronald Reagan before him) promised to

“Make America Great Again,” because greatness is great and whatever situation we’re in at any

given moment, it’s not great. Occasionally, there is the low-wattage duel such as the 1996

contest between Bob Dole, who was a “A Better Man for a Better America,” and Bill Clinton,

who was “Building a Bridge to the 21st Century,” whatever that means. Usually, however, the

incumbents tell us how good life is, and the challengers try to explain that we’re really quite

unhappy, no matter how we might feel about things at the moment.

The fact that so many free citizens nonetheless believe that they are on the edge of disaster is an

indication of how much has changed, and how much has been forgotten, in the space of just a

few decades. Until COVID-19, the world had been spared a serious pandemic for a full century.

America and its allies have not faced a global war—the kind requiring national mobilization and

a draft—for over three-quarters of a century. The Great Recession of 2008 was a recession, not a

depression; not only was it overcome relatively quickly, but American consumers went right

back to their bad credit habits within a decade. (Nor did the pandemic-induced recession of 2020

result in a global economic crash, despite early predictions of widespread disaster.) The citizens

of the world’s democracies are being taught, both by political entrepreneurs and by their own

inflated sense of expectation, that the ordinary pressures, worries, and temptations of life in an

open society are serial catastrophes for which the only remedy is the abandonment of their own

freedoms.

The diminishing of threats and the elevation of expectations, coupled with the dullness of daily

life in a society gorged on more forms of leisure that it can comprehend, is both the triumph of

liberal democracy and a danger to it. Eric Hoffer, who wrote his classic work The True Believer

in 1951, warned:

There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the

prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise

of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements

are more likely to find sympathizers among the bored than among the exploited and suppressed.

To a deliberate fomenter of mass upheavals, the report that people are bored stiff should be at

least as encouraging as that they are suffering from intolerable economic or political abuses.4

The conservative writer George Will put it more simply in 2020, noting that affluent societies are

often gripped by a “hunger for apocalypse,” a wish for a great struggle that could give drama and

deeper meaning, a frisson of risk, to the otherwise dull rhythm of life in a country that meets

almost all of the needs of its population at almost all times, and entertains them continuously

while doing so.5 Democracy, at its best, is boring, and when a society becomes attached to the

idea that boredom is a burden that government should alleviate, the attraction of politics beyond

the edge of reason becomes a matter of entertainment rather than of justice or even of necessity.

The real question is not whether the world is in better shape than it was decades ago. It is.

Rather, the issue is whether the achievements of the past half century have had the unintended

consequence of undermining many of the qualities essential to the survival of a democracy.

If it seems somewhat astonishing to trace the decline of modern democracy to peace, affluence,

and technological progress, step back in time for a moment and consider the transition from the

old world of the post-1945 Cold War order to the world in which we live today. Before we can

think about the views of ordinary citizens, the failures of governing elites, or the challenges

facing both of them, we need to think more dispassionately about life in the twenty-first century

and why it looks the way it does.

PEACE—AT A PRICE

Let’s start with peace. To say the world is more peaceful in 2020 than in 1970 or 1980 is a fact.

It also feels somehow false. It feels, at some basic emotional level, like a contradiction in a world

full of unpredictable threats that can strike Americans closer to home, especially after 9/11, when

terrorists killed more people in a day than the Empire of Japan managed to kill in a major action

against an entire U.S. military installation on the opening day of a war. Patriotic young men and

women showed up at recruiting stations in 2001 and volunteered to fight overseas, just as they

did in 1941. To this day, men and women from the United States, NATO, and other democratic

nations are scattered about the globe and fighting battles against determined enemies who hate

them. Peace? Nonsense.

And yet, as the saying goes, there is no point in arguing over things we can look up. Leave aside

for a moment the fact that we no longer live under the constant threat of nuclear Armageddon.

(The nuclear weapons are still there, but in much reduced numbers, and without the constant

possibility of imminent hostilities.) There are fewer bloody struggles around the world, and they

are taking fewer lives. This does not mean that the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in places

like Syria, where the death toll after nearly a decade of war is now well over a half million, are

not each a tragedy. But to believe that the world is more riven by conflict today than in the past

is to engage in a loss of collective memory of places such as Biafra and Bangladesh, where two

conflicts between 1967 and 1971 killed millions, or of Rwanda in 1994, where well over three-

quarters of a million people were butchered in just over one hundred days.

Americans and Europeans could respond that such places are far away and such incidents are

long ago, and that their own daily experience is one of threats and violence. A generation with no

memory of the time before 9/11 is convinced that America is endlessly “at war.” To lament that

the American military is constantly deployed to violent areas, where they must engage in actual

combat, is literally true, and it is fair criticism to ask why. To believe that such engagements only

began after 9/11, however, or that they are more destructive now, betrays yet another failure of

memory or a willful disregard of history. (In a similar vein, many Americans also refuse to

believe that violent crime at home is down even from just a few decades ago. Violent crime rates

have been on a steady decline since the 1990s, but the idea that the United States is in the grip of

a crime wave is yet another persistent myth in the twenty-first century.)6

Consider how differently Americans regard their current engagements from the searing national

effort their parents and grandparents poured into Vietnam. I began high school in 1975, only two

years after the national draft had ended. The kids in my hometown, even at my younger age,

were more aware of the war than others, perhaps, because our city was home to a major U.S. Air

Force base whose B-52s had flown bombing missions directly to Vietnam. Some of my first

memories of television are of the evening news footage of Americans fighting in Southeast Asia.

My parents, whose son would soon be of draft age, usually stared at these images silently but

with evident anxiety. And yet by the time I arrived at Chicopee Comprehensive High School that

autumn, the war was over. It was already someone else’s nightmare. But at least I knew it

occurred and I could see the toll it took on American society, even as a clueless freshman in no

danger of being called to serve anywhere.

By comparison, when my daughter began high school in 2016 in our small Rhode Island town

(which is home to a large U.S. Navy installation) in the supposed era of “endless wars,” the idea

of war as a massive national effort was completely alien to American society. A draft is

unthinkable. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are more like global policing; by the time my

daughter was old enough to pay attention to the news, these engagements had been going on for

some fifteen years as prophylactic measures against the general threat of terrorism and had

produced only a fraction of the casualties taken in Vietnam. By comparison to what I knew even

as a young child in the 1960s, these overseas conflicts were mostly invisible to her and the

generations just before her. Vietnam was a war whose large engagements with both guerrillas

and the uniformed soldiers of an enemy state were broadcast into American homes. The “endless

wars,” by the time President Joe Biden announced a 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, had

dwindled mostly to engagements with irregular forces and gangs of murderers, and barely made

the headlines anymore.

For all the talk of “war weariness” among Americans, citizens who are not in the military or who

are not part of a military family or community have not had to endure even minor

inconveniences due to U.S. military activity and commitments, much less shoulder major

burdens such as a draft, a war tax, or resource shortages. Aside from the occasional indignities at

the airport, most people would be hard-pressed to describe themselves as living in a country

under threat. Little wonder that the soldiers who served overseas in those first years of major

operations soon felt forgotten. “America’s not at war,” went a common complaint among the

troops. “The military’s at war. America’s at the mall.”

The martial spirit that overtook the United States and other nations after 9/11 long ago dissipated

into frustration with the lack of progress abroad and irritation with overly expansive security

measures at home. American military engagements since the fiasco of Iraq twenty years ago—it

is almost too much to call them “wars”—have been conducted by a small sliver of the

population. For the general public, despite our reluctance to say so, it has been a stable peace. It

is, to be sure, peace bought by exhausted volunteers, but it is peace, nonetheless.

This peace has had paradoxical effects. As the Tufts professor and Washington Post columnist

Dan Drezner wrote in 2019, Americans might complain about foreign entanglements, but by and

large they ignore foreign policy. “Public opinion,” he notes, “has ceased to act as a real

constraint on decision-makers,” because the combination of geographic isolation, overwhelming

power, and an all-volunteer force have allowed most Americans “to stop caring about vital

questions of war and peace. The apathy has only grown since the end of the Cold War, and

today, poll after poll reveals that Americans rarely, if ever, base their vote on foreign policy

considerations.”7

In fact, the Global War on Terror only briefly interrupted a tradition of apathy about foreign

affairs that long predated 9/11 and Iraq and stretched back into the Cold War itself. When the

USSR fell and took with it the daily fear of nuclear annihilation, America stood alone and

unchallenged. The democracies after 1991 became safer from an existential threat to their way of

life, but they also lost a sense of purpose about why they valued that way of life in the first place.

Andrew Bacevich, a relentless and often excessive critic of American decadence, nonetheless put

it well in 2020:

Winning the Cold War brought Americans face-to-face with a predicament comparable to that

confronting the lucky fellow who wins the Mega Millions lottery: hidden within an apparent

windfall is the potential for monumental disaster. Putting that windfall to good use while

avoiding the pitfalls inherent in suddenly acquired riches calls for prudence and self-awareness—

not easily demonstrated when the big house, luxury car, and vacation condo you’ve always

wanted are yours for the asking.8

The end of the Cold War, of course, did not mean a new Lexus waiting for all of us in the

driveway. Bacevich, however, has a point that within a few years of the Soviet collapse, any

notion of a common struggle against a mortal threat seemed almost silly, and most of us moved

on almost immediately rather than thinking seriously about the long struggle from which we’d

just emerged.

With the Soviet Union gone and no serious challenge from an alternative to liberal democracy,

multiple U.S. and Western leaders tried to recast the fight against al-Qaeda and ISIS as

something like the former East-West struggle, and a rudderless nation, alone at the apex of

power, briefly found new purpose in a war against mass-murdering terrorists. I was tempted by

this same parallelism: I wrote a book shortly after 2001 in which I argued that the United States

might well be in a long-term battle, an ideological struggle similar to the Cold War with forces

that were, in every sense, anti-Western. As it turns out, Western strategists (including me)

overestimated their opponents, who were relatively easy to defeat on the battlefield but difficult

to eradicate in detail. Eventually, the U.S. and its allies abandoned the notion that they were in an

epochal struggle against a new horde of barbarians, and the “war on terror” devolved from major

battles in Afghanistan into a series of street brawls in various parts of the world against loosely

organized forces whose military skills were often directed mostly to the rape and murder of

unarmed civilians.

The final act of the 9/11 era was the self-inflicted wound of the Iraq War in 2003. This was a

discretionary crusade, popular with an American public and a U.S. national security

establishment that had wanted to settle scores with Saddam Hussein for over a decade. And yet,

even after the George W. Bush administration bungled the postwar occupation of Iraq, Bush was

returned to office with over 50 percent of the vote; congressional Republicans took their

punishment in 2006, only to return to a majority four years later. If the public was enraged about

all of this military adventurism, they seemed unwilling to make it a priority at the ballot box.

(Donald Trump, for his part, bombed Syria twice and courted war with Iran. His supporters later

lauded him for having started no new wars overseas, which was true as well of Obama, evidence

yet again that exasperation with military deployments, among the general public, is mostly a

matter of partisan point-scoring.)9

By 2016, “endless wars” were talking points among the far right and far left, but the petering out

of the campaigns against terrorists and the failure of either Russia or China to emerge in the

interim as a powerful anti-Western nemesis removed any sense of urgency from the American

public about war and peace. The heroic Cold War narratives about fighting radical Islam were

replaced by the reality of young U.S. and NATO soldiers, volunteers all, grinding out their days

in the desert trying to find terrorists like the cowardly Jihadi John, a failed hip-hop artist from

London who went to the Middle East to gain his fame by beheading helpless aid workers on

YouTube. To this day, the civilians back home, for their part, are annoyed not by the

ubiquitousness of conflict but by things like airport screenings and other minor practices of a

new security theater that now seems only like a series of random indignities untethered from any

substantive threat.

The Cold War compromised democratic societies, and especially the Americans, in ways their

citizens still do not like to think about, including the institutionalization of expansive statist

policies built around national security. But the Global War on Terror made us all into something

worse. This time, with no viable challenge to American democracy on the horizon, the fighting

was outsourced to volunteers without a draft, without anything like a national mobilization or

any other requirement for shared sacrifice. And Americans were, as a nation, fine with that—at

least to judge from their electoral choices every two to four years.

IT DOESN’T FEEL LIKE AFFLUENCE

Most people, on reflection, might concede at least some of the point about a more peaceful

world. A more “affluent” world is a tougher sell; in his 2016 speech in Europe, Obama tried to

make the case for living in the “most prosperous, most progressive era in human history,” but

when I have suggested to students and other public audiences over the past decade or so that we

now live in an affluent time, I am met with looks of disbelief. (Even younger students who

intensely admire Obama will shake their heads at the former president’s cluelessness in a classic

case of generational disconnection.) Honestly, professor! These are terrible times and have been

for ages—everyone knows that.

Part of the problem with judging the times in which we live is that it is common for people to

think times are bad even if their own situations are happy enough. There are multiple reasons for

this, many of them rooted in human psychology.10 Older people, for example, tend to remember

their youth fondly because they’re old, and because their minds have filed away the bad times

and are now replaying the good times. Also, by our nature, we do not like to jinx the present by

saying that things are going well. Moreover, there is the problem of immediate experience. As

every economist—and every politician—knows, explaining the low unemployment rate to a

woman who is unemployed is both cruel and pointless. For her, the rate is 100 percent, and the

fact that someone in another time zone has a job illuminates little and changes nothing.

This is why it seems almost crazy to talk about the impact of “affluence” at this point in history,

since so many Americans, along with rioters in places like Paris and Athens, seem to think they

are living in an economic hellscape. This, in part, is a lingering response to the Great Recession

of 2008, when the global spending party came to a crashing halt, but it is also a response to fears

about the Great Recession that remained in the culture after it was over, in the same way that the

Great Depression made its mark long after the recovery. The Great Recession has become a

touchstone in many of the narratives about why Americans have turned against their own

institutions, but, as we will see, it is not an explanation that takes us very far. There is no real

coherence in the choices Americans have made since the crash; they remain uninterested in

reform, angry at bailouts, and unwilling to embrace even moderate notions of austerity.

Anger at a “broken” democracy persists under economically good conditions because, for

millions of people, the modern era doesn’t feel like affluence, even when they themselves are

well-off. Instead, it feels like China and other competitors are putting workers in the

postindustrial democracies on the unemployment line, a case Donald Trump made on the

campaign trail to great effect in 2016. It feels like apartments and houses in big cities like New

York or San Francisco are out of reach. And indeed they are, even for many well-off

professionals. It feels like health care, at least in America, is dangerously expensive—because it

is.

This is why compassionate observers will argue that the Americans of the past decade or so, like

the others around the world gravitating toward populist and authoritarian alternatives, are just fed

up and desperate. These citizens are not political scientists or philosophy professors trying to

parse each candidate and assign them a score on some cosmic scale of moral rectitude. They just

want a roof over their heads and food on the table. They want to believe that they will not have

to work until their dying day and that their children will have a future in a country that once

promised them that opportunity.

Under these reasonable concerns, however, are several nearly insoluble problems for the liberal

democracies. Perhaps most important is the degree to which people are now fixated on a sense of

relative deprivation. Even when people believe they are doing reasonably well, they are

infuriated when they also believe that they are worse off than others or are doing more poorly

than they should be doing. The twenty-first century is an era of massive income inequality, and

that’s a problem in itself for a variety of reasons. But as a political matter, inequality becomes

even more salient when citizens are highly aware of it.11 Paradoxically, this can sometimes

become a source of greater social friction between people closer in status than those further

apart. (As Hoffer presciently wrote in 1951: “Our frustration is greater when we have much and

want more than when we have nothing and want some.”12) It is one thing for people to know

that others are doing better than they are, which produces uneasy resentment; it’s another to

know how much better off they are, which spurs a hotter sense of raw injustice.

Add to this the influence of the media, and especially of social media, which encourages all of us

to examine the idealized lives of others, and thus us to conclude that our own lives are somehow

less fulfilling. Once this notion becomes ingrained in voters, it becomes difficult to ever

convince them otherwise. Their current situation is always stacked either against the lives of

their friends, celebrities, or absolute strangers, or, even worse, against an imagined alternative

future.

What’s really going on here is an intensifying cycle of expectation and disappointment, of

progress and change, of dislocation in one place and prosperity in another. Writers such as E. J.

Dionne disagree, noting that “certain views take hold because they comport with both lived

experiences and the data. So it is with the belief that the American Dream, as we have come to

understand it, is in grave jeopardy.”13 But note here Dionne’s important caveat: the American

Dream as we have come to understand it. Likewise, in an examination of Europe, the Estonian

leader Toomas Ilves objects to the framing of the inequality debate, noting how much it “ignores

real data”:

It takes but a look at the Gini coefficient in these countries—the measure of income inequality—

to see this is nonsense. Income inequality across the whole of the EU has been stable, and in

some cases declining. Across the board it is much lower than it is in, say, the United States,

where it has been high and rising, especially under the current populist administration. And there

is no absence of populists in the countries with one of the lowest income differential coefficients,

Hungary.14

Once people believe that the bad times are terrible and the good times are never good enough,

there is little chance of changing their minds. In 1994—a time of American economic growth

and prosperity—an employed yet angry Ohio steelworker named Rick Crum told a New York

Times reporter that politicians were all “leeches;” when pressed about his anger, he said: “If

inflation is so low, how come cereal is $4.75 a box?” (Mr. Crum made an exception for one

politician: his own member of Congress. “I get a lot of mail from her,” he said. “She seems to be

trying.”)15

Another thorny problem is that these notional harms are almost impossible to remedy, because

they are open-ended. This is related to the problem of “hedonic adaptation,” the human tendency

to regard one’s current state of comfort as the baseline. A 2019 survey of American spending and

saving habits commissioned by the Charles Schwab investment firm, for example, found that

Americans, particularly younger people, feel a “pressure to spend as a result of social media

envy and the desire to not be left out of friends’ experiences,” and they believe it takes an

average $2.3 million in personal net worth to be considered “wealthy”—or, put another way,

more than twenty times the actual median net worth of U.S. households. (Millionaires, in case

you were curious, feel that “rich” begins at $7.5 million.)16 In 2020, the New Republic writer

Bruce Bartlett— a former official in George H. W. Bush’s Treasury Department—fumed against

people making six figure incomes and yet still wanting $1,200 checks in COVID relief from the

U.S. government. Bartlett noted that these “whiners who earn $200,000 and complain they’re

broke” do not lack wealth; rather, because they are spending to the very edge of their income,

they lack liquidity, “and therefore essentially live hand-to-mouth.”17

For the rest of us, hedonic adaptation is a simpler matter. If you’ve had a queen-size bed for a

while, anything else feels small. If you eat sirloin long enough, everything else tastes like leather.

The memory of a time of more austere living fades away; whatever the current state of life is like

is the new baseline and anything below it is intolerable. Citizens caught in this hamster wheel of

ever-rising expectations will, sooner or later, exhaust every type of government.

The economist Donald Boudreaux took on the issue of living standards in a 2020 debate about

whether “middle class stagnation” in the new century was a myth, or at least whether it is the

crisis Americans believe it to be. Perhaps I am victim of my own confirmation bias, but I was

struck by a passage that resonated with the similarity to my own life and generation:

I’m a time traveler from the 1970s. Born in 1958 into a working-class American family, I lived

through the 1970s. And while it took me several decades to arrive in the year 2020, now that I’m

finally here I can report that my recollections of the 1970s remain vivid. Here’s the bottom line:

Ordinary Americans today have a material standard of living that is vastly higher than was the

standard of living of ordinary Americans forty or fifty years ago.

Examples of this improvement are legion. Smartphones, personal computers, the Internet,

overnight package delivery, GPS navigation, streaming music, hi-definition television, on-line

debates. . . . We Boudreaux would have danced with delight had we in the 1970s been given

access to any one of these wonders.18

This feeling of amazement would have applied as well to the Nichols family, waiting in the late

1960s for a verdict from the television repairman—and I wonder if those even exist anymore—

on the health of our only set. (As it turned out, our loyal living room companion just needed a

small and inexpensive part that cost less than the visit itself.) The experience, however, is the

same: I am living at a standard I could not imagine as a working-class child a half century ago, or

even as a struggling graduate student thirty-five years ago, and not because I am well-off, but

because much of what surrounds me in my daily life simply did not exist in the 1970s and the

1980s.

Boudreaux’s fellow economist Branko Milanović reacted, as many critics of the current era

might, with incredulity at what he deemed to be Boudreaux’s insinuation that Americans should

be happy with gadgets instead of growth. Boudreaux, he complains, “compares income of

today’s middle-class Americans with income of the middle-class Americans 40 years ago using

the goods that were inexistent 40 years ago,” a “peculiar metric” that produces the desired

conclusion that since nobody had a smartphone in 1980, the existence of any smartphones at all

shows that the growth rate of income is therefore infinitely high.

I am a political scientist, and the last thing I want to do is get caught in a brawl between

economists. But it is telling that Milanović objects that “in no country or time (especially if the

world income is growing), have people judged their situation by comparing their income with

that of their grandparents.” That is demonstrably false; in our current era, all many of us do is

compare our income and our living situation to that of our parents and grandparents. While it is

invidious, and even cruel, to tell people to be glad that they are not having their teeth pulled and

their spleens removed by medieval barber-surgeons, it is fair to take the critics of the globalized

world to task for comparisons made within living memory. I do not remember a time before

television, but smartphones actually exist and were introduced within my adult lifetime. This

technology has changed my productivity and my standard of living in a way that I cannot

measure purely by income.

When judging the track record of liberal democracy, these changes in living standards cannot be

dismissed as mere anecdotes. They matter in a real and concrete way. As the economist Michael

Strain wrote in 2020, “the argument—and even the implication—that quality of life hasn’t

improved for typical households and individuals in decades . . . borders on the absurd.” Strain

objects to a tendency among populists of arguing by “highlighting pockets of (actual, serious)

problems and confusing them for the common experience of typical people in the United States

today.” As Strain notes with some frustration, this populist insistence on treating ordinary

citizens as victims who are somehow bereft of human agency not only “miscalibrates” their

expectations, but does so in order to sell them a “message of economic and social despair” even

in the midst of rising living standards and social progress.19 This is the cycle in which populists

and political opportunists raise expectations, and then use the inevitable failure to meet those

inflated expectations as the justification for illiberal solutions.

At the risk of engaging in dueling statistics, it is important to understand the difference between

the false nostalgia for the past and the reality of the present. Is college, for example, now more

expensive? Yes. The cost of attaining a degree has risen to absurd levels, for reasons that range

from stingy state legislators to administrative bloat to the endless supply of loan money. But the

cheaper schooling of an earlier age wasn’t distributed very widely. In 1980 (when I was still in

college), only 14 percent of women had a college degree. By 2018—again, within a single adult

lifetime—that number jumped to 55 percent. (Men in the same period went from 21 percent to

35 percent.) In 1983, as the U.S. was coming out of a brutal recession, the median net worth of

an American family was $52,000; by 2016 it was $97,300.20 The jump was far higher for richer

people—but this unequal increase still means that all families were better off. We could do this

for pages, about any number of indicators from heart attack survival rates to vehicle fatalities to

the number of years of a human life taken up by work.

In the end, Barack Obama was right: if you could choose a time to be born, it would be now.

That doesn’t mean we can’t do better, but to dismiss the progress of the past fifty years achieved

by free societies—and the experts who serve them—is a foolish basis for the rejection of

democracy.

Critics could argue that exceptions also matter, and that a society in which most people do well

while some do very poorly is not a just society, and that to ignore such suffering is as dishonest a

method of argument as that employed by the decline-obsessed populists. There is, without doubt,

a fair amount of bad faith in arguments about whether people are better off today. One side glibly

waves away the problem of averages, adding the few incomes of the super-rich to the mix to

make the world overall seem like an equitable place, and they ignore the sense of injustice

created by the emergence of a class that will soon include trillionaires, something that once was

impossible because there literally was not enough money in the world to create such a class. I am

an upper-middle-class professional who begrudges no one their success, and yet I find that I, too,

reflexively recoil at the notion of someone who has to count that many zeroes in their net worth.

(Or, more realistically, who has to pay someone to count those zeroes for them.)

The other side, however, romanticizes life in a previous century based purely on economic data.

They carefully, and in my view dishonestly, ignore the reality that almost no one would really

prefer to live in the world of fifty years ago. It is an argument based on selective memory,

presenting certain realities—cheaper college tuition and single-earner families among them—

completely out of the context of the times in which they occurred. The world of a half century

ago, one within the living memory of millions of adults around the world, was one of oxygen

tents, unsafe cars, smoking at work, and, just in case we were having a carefree day, the constant

threat of complete global annihilation. It was a time when women stayed in the house whether

they wanted to or not, when a married male’s income could support a family—and had to—

because those men had no competition at home or abroad.

The issue of justice is crucial and one we’ll take up when thinking about solutions later in the

book. But the question of living standards matters because it is in itself an important measure of

the performance of a system of government. The old Soviet Union had a lot of income equality,

achieved by keeping people at low standards of living. For most people, it was an unjust but

relatively equalized system. Those who will argue that “the system is broken” have internalized

only some of the economic facts of the past century while conveniently ignoring all the other

realities that went along with that world. If you were a working, non-draft-age, white male,

whose memories of childhood were formed in the Great Depression, you might think quite

fondly of the 1950s, even right up to the 1980s. If you were a person of color, a woman, gay or

lesbian, a draftee, mentally or physically disabled, or a member of any number of marginalized

communities, perhaps not so much.

This raises another set of challenges to democracy that come from the paradoxical impact of

affluence. The question of economic justice would have far greater resonance if the attacks on

democracy were coming from the very poorest in every society. They’re not. Instead, populist

and authoritarian alternatives are often driven by resentments among and between the upper and

middle classes. The most disadvantaged members of society, if we are honest enough to say it,

do not have enough of a voice to destabilize a government or a political system. They aren’t even

likely to vote; as a 2019 study of nonvoters found, they are people “who are generally below the

poverty line, with a lot of job turnover and family disruption, whose lives are busy living

paycheck to paycheck.”21

European observers, perhaps because they are more comfortable talking about class issues, have

zeroed in on what Financial Times writer Martin Wolf calls “plutopopulism”—the bankrolling of

antiestablishment celebrity candidates by people who are very much part of the new

establishment, at least if measured by sheer wealth. Likewise, the British writer Simon Kuper

noted in 2020 that the “comfortably off populist voter is the main force behind Trump, Brexit

and Italy’s Lega,” a fact cagily ignored by opportunistic politicians who instead claim to be

acting on behalf of stereotypes like “the impoverished former factory worker,” even if there are

few such people left to represent.22 Or as the British think-tank analyst Charles Kenny, a

forceful advocate of globalization, put it: “The voters who were won over by [Trump’s]

antiglobalist message were not legitimate victims of globalization,” meaning that they were not,

in the main, people who had actually suffered the job losses or deprivations they claimed were

behind their vote.23

Sadly, faux populists hoodwinking ordinary citizens is not new. The American icon Will Rogers

was famous for his down-home observations about the rich and powerful, and many of his

sayings about politicians remain part of American folk humor today. (“With Congress, every

time they make a joke it’s a law, and every time they make a law it’s a joke.”) But Rogers knew

exactly what he was doing. His son, Will Rogers Jr., once admitted as much to the Hollywood

screenwriter Budd Schulberg. “My father was so full of shit, because he pretends he’s just one of

the people, just one of the guys,” Rogers told Schulberg after a few too many drinks. “But in our

house the only people that ever came as guests were the richest people in town, the bankers and

the power-brokers of L.A. And those were his friends and that’s where his heart is and he (was)

really a goddamned reactionary.” The elder Rogers died in a plane crash, and his son was

running for Congress. “Jesus, Will,” Schulberg replied. “You’d better keep your voice down,

because you can’t knock Will Rogers.”

The younger Rogers was elected to Congress once, and then failed in subsequent political bids.

In the 1950s, however, Schulberg used the elder Rogers as the inspiration for the character Larry

“Lonesome” Rhodes in the American film masterpiece A Face in the Crowd. Rhodes, like

Rogers, is a humble and charming character in public. He is discovered crooning songs and

dispensing wisdom in a rural Arkansas jail cell by a producer who catapults him to stardom. In

reality he is a ruthless grifter and rogue; he becomes a media sensation and is on the verge of an

unstoppable political future before he is exposed and destroyed in a fit of guilt by the same

producer (now his spurned lover) who made him famous. A Face in the Crowd was made in

1957, but—for obvious reasons—it enjoyed a revival of interest after 2016.24

Nothing shone a harsher light on the class disparities of modern American populism than the

2021 Capitol attack. The mob that overran the House and Senate was not made up of the poor

and dispossessed seeking redress of grievances. They were a bored lumpen-bourgeoisie—

middle-class citizens whose incomes allowed them to visit Washington. Many at the riot were

wearing expensive military gear, and in some cases they were accompanied by their parents as

travel companions. Many of them prattled and postured for their cameras even as they committed

any number of crimes, which facilitated their eventual arrests around the country. The attackers

included a realtor from Texas who went live on video during the violence to assure her audience

that she was, in fact, committed to getting inside the Capitol, “life or death, it doesn’t matter,”

but that upon her return to Texas everyone should know that she is a person who can handle even

the toughest real-estate deals. Another rioter asked for supervised release after her arrest so that

she could attend a pre-scheduled “work related bonding retreat” in Mexico.25

In any case, even if we grant that globalization and technological change have produced more

pain than its advocates want to admit, these processes have also produced a world in which a

high standard of living is so woven into the lives of the democracies that voters now view

affluence as a given rather than as an achievement. There are, indeed, laid-off factory workers.

And there are people (and always will be) who struggle to make ends meet. But American voters

of all classes have come to expect continual improvement in their standard of living, from an

economy they expect to provide a stream of ever-better and ever-cheaper goods and services.

The American Dream cannot produce “rags to riches,” but it has, as Strain puts it, delivered

reliably on the promise of “rags to comfort.”26 As the Financial Times columnist Edward Luce

wrote in 2017, we barely notice that the price of items like food and clothing—basic things all

human beings need, “the products you find on Walmart’s shelves”—are in fact cheaper

compared to thirty years ago, in part because we are all too well aware of the painful fact that

health insurance and college tuition are hundreds of percent higher.27

These increases, and the vanishing jobs and professions of the twentieth century, are part of the

restless anxiety of a squeezed middle class. But Luce adds the revealing condition that people in

the advanced West feel betrayed because they had counted on a belief that “by the end of their

lives our children would be three to four times better off than we are.”28 Most children,

however, are in fact already living better (again, by almost any measure of general well-being)

than their parents did at the same age—an important proviso—and so the formula of doing “far

better” can only end in political disaster. If every generation thinks the next will be three to four

times better off than itself, then the near future will look like the movie WALL-E, with obese,

immobilized citizens reclining on their couches in space-faring luxury liners while robots feed

them bon-bons and change the channels of their television screens.

For a democratic government, relative deprivation and hedonic adaptation combine to create a

no-win scenario. When times are good, they are not good enough and the political institutions

and their elites have failed. When times are bad, they’re bad, and the failure of the elites and the

system they inhabit are obvious.

Peace and affluence are not anomalies in the American experience, and they need not be, in

themselves, drivers of democratic discontent. Unfortunately, late twentieth-century Americans

convinced themselves that the boom that followed World War II should never have ended (as

though somehow other nations would never recover from the war); they likewise came to believe

that their security at home was unrelated to the dispersal of U.S. troops all over the world.

Political and economic changes, some hurtful and others beneficial, were inevitable with the rise

of a global economy and the decline of the Soviet threat. The impact of these transformations on

citizens of democracies and dictatorships alike, however, was supercharged by startling

technological advances that changed daily life in ways, once again, that we now take for granted,

from electronics to computing power to the explosion of bandwidth. These technological leaps

were more than just enablers for entertainment and gadgetry: they have contributed both to our

progressively better standard of living and to our democratic decline.

TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS AND SOCIAL DECLINE

Gordon Moore, who cofounded the computer chip maker Intel, predicted as far back as 1965 that

computing power would get much faster and much cheaper at the same time, but “Moore’s law”

didn’t really heat up until the 1990s. These rapid advances in computing, combined with

improvements in technologies such as satellite communications and advances in miniaturization,

gave ordinary citizens access to information, entertainment, and labor-saving benefits at speeds

and capacities that would have been rare even at the most advanced scientific or military

organizations only decades earlier. It is within living memory that engineers routinely used slide

rules and people who may now FaceTime a friend almost anywhere on the planet had to wait

hours even to make a transatlantic telephone call from the United States to Europe. (For younger

readers, a “slide rule” was a calculating device made of movable pieces of wood or plastic, and

the “telephone wait” back in the old days was the time it took for a U.S. operator to find an open

line on one of the busy telephone cables underneath the ocean.)

Technology has also been the enabler of drastically higher standards of living in a much shorter

time than ever before, and this has not only accelerated hedonic adaptation but has also served to

drive ever higher expectations about living standards. The entrepreneur Peter Theil, referring to

the ubiquity of Twitter, famously snarked in a 2013 presentation at Yale University about

disappointment in the future by saying that “we were promised flying cars and all we got was

140 characters.” The writer David Frum, however, put this into perspective only seven years

later when he retorted (via Twitter, no less) that “I was promised flying cars, and instead all I got

was all the world’s libraries in my pocket and the ability to videochat 24-hours a day for free

with my grandchildren on the other side of the world.”

The internet and the subsequent revolution in communications brought us something else,

however, that was, like so many innovations, an advance full of promise that turned on us

because of our own bad habits. We are now locally and globally connected to each other at a

level of involvement that is unhealthy for us on both a social and political level. This is not just a

problem of social media, although that is the breeding ground for so much of what plagues

modern democracy. It is more than global connection. It is a persistent presence in each other’s

lives that encourages us never to leave each other alone in the virtual world while avoiding any

real human contact in the physical world.

This is deadly to a democracy, which relies as much on reflection as it does on civic interaction.

We have become a performative culture, where our politics and even our tastes and preferences

are displayed at every moment. The competition for attention and approval has become as fierce

as the fight for any other scarce resource, and like any other zero-sum game, it often ends in

disaster. Michael Goldhaber, the academic who years ago popularized the notion of an “attention

economy”—in which those who can gain attention gain political and cultural strength—

described the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol as one example of this kind of competition, calling

it a predictable result of “thousands of influencers and news outlets that, in an attempt to gain

fortune and fame and attention, trotted out increasingly dangerous conspiracy theories on

platforms optimized to amplify outrage.”29 And because we now experience our lives as citizens

through the mediation both of the internet and media outlets that have nothing but time and

bandwidth, we can continue this social and political combat with just a few clicks on a keyboard

or the remote to our televisions.

It sounds “undemocratic” to say it, but the democracies were more stable when political news

and exposure to political leaders came in smaller packages, such as a daily newspaper, or the

twenty-eight minutes of the evening news. When we took in political information in smaller

doses, we could (if we were so inclined) take time to think, to reflect, and to discuss. It is a cliché

to say now that acceleration of technology has progressed beyond the point where human beings

can process the improvements raining down on them at ever shortening intervals, but it is a

cliché because it is literally true. By 2015, U.S. consumers were taking in so much data on their

various devices that, by one estimate, the average person would need more than fifteen hours a

day to see it all.30 This is bad enough when the average consumer is trying to take in both

entertainment and information. Add to this the virtualization of our social and political life and it

is a democratic disaster in the making.

And yet all this virtualization helped to blunt the impact of an international crisis when COVID-19 struck.

The ability to relocate our workplaces, to stay in touch with each other even in isolation, even to be able

to limit the spread of disease by cutting the amount of time it takes to pick up groceries, showed that

the interconnected world was a lot more resilient than many of us might have thought. (There was a

spate of “the pandemic means the end of globalization” pieces in early 2020, but as the globalized

economy proved to be a great advantage in fighting the pandemic, those voices became a bit quieter.)

Still, after being trapped in front of our screens for so long during the COVID pandemic, it is possible we

will fall out of love with our personal technology. Years of rhapsodizing about how advanced societies

could transition education and meetings and social gatherings to the virtual world have been undone by

the reality of “Zoom Fatigue” and headaches from staring at other people on screens all day. Children do

not learn as effectively sitting in their rooms while their teachers and other students stare at glowing

screens. But many of us will, as we have for some thirty years, draw the opposite conclusion, and

continue to see the online world as the great equalizer, a giant arena for the political and social

equivalent of primal scream therapy.

HAPPINESS IS A HARD MASTER

In the end, the challenge to democracy isn’t from continual war, economic scarcity, or the

difficulties of daily life, all of which were features more characteristic of the late twentieth

century than of the early twenty-first. Democracy is not in danger from new tribulations, but

from new achievements: Democracies, it seems, cannot cope with peace, affluence, and progress.

To say this as an observation is not to wish for an economic catastrophe, nor is it a call for the

national unity of “blood and iron.” (Some of the opponents of people like Trump and other

populists actually hoped for an economic downturn before the 2020 election, thinking that it

would be a bucket of cold water over the heads of an irrational crowd, but populists are clever

enough to use such moments as confirmation that the elites have failed yet again and that their

views were right all along.)31 The unity of war, of course, is temporary, and democracies, like

any other regime, bear its burdens at great risk.

Peace is a great gift. Global economic cooperation is, in some form, inevitable. Technological

change is irresistible. But if these advances turn us into self-absorbed and petulant children, then

we have not gained very much. Democracy is a set of behaviors and beliefs that make

institutions work, not a machine that grants wishes. The United States and any other nation that

calls itself “democratic” must reinvent a way to protect democratic values and the inherent rights

of each of its citizens while solving real problems—and taking advantage of real opportunities—

produced by the new century. Blaming “the system,” the elites, the economy, immigrants, and

anything else has turned out to be a dead end.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a group of “World Controllers” eradicate war and social

disorder in the far future by inundating human beings with pleasure, including sex, drugs, and

pneumatic massage chairs. The Controllers do not outlaw democracy; they don’t have to. They

make happiness the highest value, define happiness as sensory pleasure, and provide it at will. As

one of the World Controllers says near the book’s conclusion, “happiness is a hard master,”

referring to the giant effort poured into keeping the population sated and docile. But it works.

Brave New World was written in 1932. Seventeen years (and a world war) later, in 1949, George

Orwell posited a different end for democracy in his classic dystopian novel 1984, in which a

dictatorial Party wins by grasping the central truth that the wielding of power for its own sake

will always triumph over watery ideas about truth or law or morality. Orwell, writing while

Hitler was only recently dead and Stalin was very much alive, feared that human beings could be

controlled far more effectively through pain and fear than through pleasure. Both Huxley and

Orwell, interestingly enough, believed that their new dictators would emerge after a terrible war,

but during the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union, most Westerners feared Orwell’s image

of a boot stomping on a human face forever more than they did Huxley’s warning that the end of

democracy would be a drug-assisted suicide rather than a totalitarian murder.

In the mid-1980s, however, a New York University professor named Neil Postman wondered if

maybe the Cold War struggle was blinding us to the possibility that Huxley was right after all.

And what, Postman wondered, if we were already subjugating ourselves, by our own volition,

with no need of World Controllers or the Inner Party of Orwell’s Oceania, and willingly

embracing a world ordered around entertainment and fueled by material plenty? Postman

worried, as the title of his book announced, that we were in the process of “amusing ourselves to

death,” and he dedicated his book to the notion that maybe Huxley, not Orwell, was right.32

Postman was thirty years ahead of his time. But to discover why, we have to start even farther

back in history. It is typical almost to the point of ritual to begin every examination with a nod to

Alexis de Tocqueville and his reflections on America in the 1840s. It does not help us much

today, however, to dwell on the behavior of homesteaders and frontiersmen two hundred years

ago. Those who can find answers in Tocqueville are people who already understand the nature of

democracy and citizenship. Instead, we must look to a small Italian village in the 1950s. An

American scholar who could not understand why his own people could not get along with each

other and make their own lives better went looking for answers in places like Utah and Arizona,

and finally in Italy. He found a small community where nothing seemed to get done, and where

no one gave a hoot about democracy. It was full of good people who loved their families but who

somehow did not care about each other.

In the next chapter, we’ll visit this lovely village and meet its people. Their story is a cautionary

tale from the past that could turn out to be our collective future in our own brave and dystopian

new world.