Journal Entries #3

3

“Is There No Virtue Among Us?”

Democracy in an Age of Rage and Resentment

The West’s souring mood is about the psychology of dashed expectations rather than the decline in material comforts.

—Edward Luce

The most obvious explanation for American political life since the end of the Cold War is that we have become an unserious country populated by an unserious people.

—Jonathan V. Last

Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.

—James Madison

AN UNVIRTUOUS NATION

It is disturbing enough to realize that our neighbors might be good people but bad citizens. But what happens if the citizens of a democratic nation, whatever their civic habits, are no longer virtuous enough as a people to sustain their own institutions? Good people can, from time to time, be bad citizens. Nations, like families, can persevere through periods of anger and estrangement. Liberal democracy, however, cannot long survive among an unvirtuous people. The collapse of virtue, public and private, leads not only to bad citizenship, but also to the eventual impossibility of producing good citizens at all.

Even more than questions about what makes a good or bad citizen, questions about virtue seem intrusive and judgmental. Democracies, we might think, are not based on virtue, but on everyone behaving moderately well while minding their own business. To ruminate on who is a virtuous person is a matter for ancient philosophers; to investigate the feelings or beliefs of other citizens is the road taken by the eternal social and political busybody. As Louis Brandeis famously wrote in 1928, “the right to be let alone” is “the most comprehensive of the rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” Just as liberal democracies long ago rejected literacy tests and poll taxes for the universal franchise, they cannot today institute some sort of moral test at the entrance to the voting booth. In a tolerant, secular democracy, what’s in our hearts when we show up to vote is between us and our conscience.

And yet, as much as Americans may prefer to ignore this part of their national history, the Founders of the American republic understood the existential link between virtue and democracy. They knew that to believe in some magical difference between how we live our lives as individuals and how we conduct ourselves as citizens in a community was only a reassuring fantasy. “Public virtue,” John Adams wrote in early 1776, “cannot exist in a nation without private virtue, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.” A year earlier, his cousin Sam (in a letter sneering about the well-known adultery of a doctor who turned to the British during the Revolutionary War) wrote, in his characteristically blunt way: “There is seldom an instance of a man guilty of betraying his country, who had not before lost the feeling of moral obligations in his private connections.”1

More important, the Founders understood that institutional design could not overcome the worst impulses of human nature if human beings themselves decided to give in to those base instincts. “I go on this great republican principle,” James Madison said at the Virginia convention to ratify the Constitution in 1788,

that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.2

The Founders knew that ballot boxes and legislatures and courtrooms—all of which exist today in even the most repressive states—could not sustain a democratic nation without some understanding among the public of duty, tolerance, sacrifice, cooperation, compromise, and the inherent truth of individual rights.

Nor were the American Founders under any illusions about human nature, including their own. It was Madison, after all, who said that “if men were angels,” government itself would not be necessary. The Founders, whatever their many virtues, also fired scalding insults at each other, passed intemperate laws, and in general acted like flawed and sometimes terrible human beings. They counted among their number true geniuses and heroes, but their ranks were also rife with egomaniacs and opportunists. More damning, they left the tumor of slavery intact next to the infant heart of their new republic and set the stage for the greatest bloodletting in American history.

If we can forgive the people of the eighteenth century who founded a democracy, we need not be overly demanding about the failings of human nature two hundred years later. Even in the most admirable democracies, there will be cynical and disengaged citizens. Some will always harbor irrational hatreds and low motives. Others will see government only as a means for purely selfish and transactional gains. At every public meeting of some kind in an open and free society, the law of averages, if nothing else, will guarantee that there are going to be truly terrible people in the crowd, including the usual crank who shows up to excoriate everyone else.

But when we’re all that local crank—when enough of us are continually angry, entitled, and conspiracy-addled—civic life becomes impossible. The public square empties out. Paranoia and fear become the dominant emotions. In such a world, citizens end up retreating to castles surrounded by moats filled with bizarre rationalizations and parapets loaded with boiling hostility, lowering the drawbridge only long enough to engage in necessary trade for supplies.

Most people do not need to be exemplary human beings or deep political thinkers in order to be good citizens. (And, of course, there are many good citizens who pay attention to the news, cast unremarkable votes for mainstream candidates, and diligently pay their taxes while also being execrable people.) But citizens at least have to believe in notions of virtue and civic responsibility and act on them with some regularity, even if they cannot consistently practice them. A “virtuous” people cannot be virtuous only once or twice every two to four years and still expect their own republic to function without them the rest of the time.

Liberal democracies are nurtured by infrequent events like voting but even more so by small but important habits of mind that combine self-interest with civic conviction, a commitment to participation and cooperation that is unrelated to any specific ideology or platform. This civic sensibility, reinforced by time and repetition, allows us to overcome our individual flaws and construct a durable edifice of institutions, laws, and norms that protects our rights and freedoms. In the modern democracies, however, that edifice is now being washed away by the citizens themselves, as civic virtue drowns in narcissism, anger, and resentment. Bad citizenship is a passing malady, and it can remedied by any number of means. But an unvirtuous people is a fundamental and potentially fatal threat to a liberal democracy.

THE NARCISSISM PANDEMIC

The most important ingredient in the decline of modern democracy is narcissism, the true pandemic that is at the root of almost all of democracy’s problems. Narcissism, the unhealthy preoccupation with the self to the exclusion of all else—and especially to the exclusion of other human beings—tempts us away from thinking about the needs of other people and to see them only as objects in relation to our own happiness. Its traveling companion is entitlement, the selfish and self-absorbed conviction that our own importance merits constant reward. Narcissism undermines virtue of every kind, but it is particularly deadly to the social trust that allows democracy to endure in hard times. By definition, a democracy is a community. By definition, a narcissist is incapable of holding or granting membership in a community.

How we got here is an important question, but no matter which roads we traveled, Americans, along with a fair number of citizens elsewhere in the developed world, have arrived at the dead end of a stunningly narcissistic and entitled society. This didn’t all happen overnight, and more than a few alert social critics saw it coming. Among the most influential was Christopher Lasch, who in a 1979 book titled The Culture of Narcissism raged against the arrival of the “new narcissist,” a hedonist questing for personal fulfillment while fending off the onset of adulthood and its responsibilities. Lasch painted a portrait of the average late-century American as an overgrown child who “extols cooperation and teamwork” while “harboring deeply antisocial impulses,” who “praises respect for rules and regulations in the secret belief that they do not apply to himself,” whose “cravings have no limits,” and whose constant demands for immediate gratification create a “state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire.”3

Lasch, who refused narrow identification with the left or the right, was not the most appealing critic. Some of his warnings turned out to be the product of blind spots, or just plain wrong. (As the writer E. J. Dionne later noted, Lasch believed that the “ideology of white supremacy no longer appears to serve any important social function,” a baffling dismissal even in its time.4) Lasch’s later work seems to be that of an academic so fed up with the attitudes of his colleagues and other cultural elites that he became, by irascible reaction, a populist. By the time he wrote The Revolt of the Elites, published shortly after his death in 1996, he was far more forgiving of the masses, and more prone to excoriate the upper classes, even to the point of excusing the same kind of civic indolence among average citizens that he might have deplored just a few decades earlier.

Still, at the end of the 1970s, Lasch could see the damage already done. In a passage that seems to predict the internet and the continual media cycle, he warned that “historical currents have converged in our time to produce not merely in artists but in ordinary men and women an escalating cycle of self-consciousness—a sense of the self as a performer under the constant scrutiny of friends and strangers.” In such a culture, plodding achievement, cooperation with others, and deferred gratification are pointless. When citizens are always performing for each other, they expect accolades and instant psychic rewards, even if they have not earned them, and they become angry and resentful if they do not get them.

Some of this, perhaps, was Lasch’s response to the cheap exhibitionism, oily decadence, and overall cultural stagnation of the disco era. (And let me add, for the benefit of younger readers, that compared to the rest of the 1970s, disco was one of the least bad parts of that decade.) David Frum has described the decade as “strange, feverish years,” a time of “unease and despair, punctuated by disaster,” while the liberal Columbia University professor Mark Lilla would later recall how difficult it is “to convey to anyone who wasn’t alive and politically aware at the time what a dreary place America seemed in the late 1970s, how lacking in direction and confidence.”5 The post–World War II glow among an older generation was gone, and the energy of their children in the mid-1960s had exhausted itself within a decade. Self-examination became the new hobby and self-actualization the new goal.

In later years, America managed to recover as a military and economic great power. American social and civic culture did not. Thirty years after Lasch launched his broadside, the psychologists Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell published The Narcissism Epidemic, a scathing study that laid out in detail the degree to which narcissism and entitlement had become woven into American life. Twenge and Campbell traced the evolution of American society from the late 1960s into the twenty-first century in a complicated tale of the synergy between affluence, entertainment, education, and a persistent youth culture marketed toward the natural human fear of aging.

These economic and cultural developments produced an ongoing problem Twenge and Campbell described as “the odd perpetual adolescence of many American adults.”

[W]e imagine narcissism in society resting on a four-legged stool. One leg is developmental, including permissive parenting and self-esteem focused education. The second leg is the media culture of shallow celebrity. The third is the Internet: Despite its many benefits, the Web serves as a conduit for individual narcissism. Finally, easy credit makes narcissistic dreams into reality. The narcissistic inflation of the self was the cultural twin of the inflation of credit. They are both bubbles, but the credit bubble popped first.6

This is a description of American society that will anger many readers, who may see a “blame the victim” accusation underneath reproaches about parenting and spending habits. But the growth of narcissism in the United States and other developed nations was not some unavoidable accident. From Lasch’s warning in the 1970s, to the political scientist Robert Putnam’s landmark work in the 1990s about “bowling alone” (the general tendency of Americans to do things individually that they once did in groups), to multiple cross-national studies of college students done over the past few decades, the growth of social isolation and the concurrent rise of narcissism should not have been a surprise.7 The rise in narcissism means increasing esteem for ourselves while our connections to others are decreasing, a terrible confluence of loving oneself more while loving one’s neighbor less.

Perhaps the most obvious example of the effect of narcissism on political life has been that Americans have become vastly more embracing of narcissistic public figures, especially at the national level. Previous traditions of stoicism in politics were always a mixed blessing, a way of hiding the medical and moral frailties of national leaders from Franklin Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy to Richard Nixon. But the idea that every candidate for national office had to be somehow authentic or relatable on a personal level became a disturbing trend in American politics in the wake of the Cold War. The writer Joan Didion captured this new sensibility in 1992 when she noticed that candidate Bill Clinton spoke about difficulties in his childhood regularly “and rather distressingly, in connection with questions raised about his adulthood.”

He frequently referred to “my pain,” and also to “my passion” or “my obsession,” as in “it would be part of my obsession as president.” He often spoke, at low points in his primary campaign, of those who remained less than enthusiastic about allowing him to realize his passion or obsession as “folks who don’t know me,” and about his need to “get the people outside Arkansas to know me like people here do.”8

This was the Clinton campaign’s attempt, as Didion wrote, to create a “dramatically more interesting character than candidate, a personality so tightly organized around its own fractures that its most profound mode often appeared to be self-pity.” Until the 1990s, this was not a quality voters normally found attractive in their prospective commander in chief.

But Bill Clinton was merely a warning of things to come. There is no way to talk about the increase in narcissism in American public life without talking about the rise of Donald Trump and the cult of personality that formed around him during his time in office and continued to surround him even in defeat. Trump has been widely described by medical professionals, colleagues who knew him, and his own niece—herself a clinical psychologist—as a narcissist.9 But even in a crowded field of narcissistic celebrities, Trump stood out in 2016 not just for his self-love but also for the slashing hostility he deployed against anyone who threatened his ego. Those who had watched Trump for decades as a tabloid celebrity knew that his public persona was based on outlandish and overblown claims, shameless lying, and merciless attacks on anyone, including his own family, who got in his way. The surprise was the degree to which millions of Americans embraced this kind of behavior and rewarded it.

Political candidates are always, to some extent, celebrities, especially since television became an indispensable part of political campaigns. The days when a William McKinley could run for president by sitting on his porch are long gone, not only in the United States, but in every nation that has electricity. But there was also a time, not so long ago, when it was unthinkable that someone as dysfunctional as Donald Trump could survive in modern American politics. Even the most self-centered American politicians were expected to rationalize their electoral bid as a call to public service. Glamorous candidates who came from privilege or previous fame, such as JFK or Ronald Reagan, had to demonstrate a common touch, often by mastering the art of the self-deprecating quip. Trump challenged this tradition by extolling himself in flat, self-aggrandizing terms that would have washed previous candidates from American public life: “I alone can fix it.” “I am the elite.” “They’re jealous of me.”

Whatever Trump’s personal shortcomings, what was most disturbing from the perspective of democratic stability was how many Americans seemed to identify with him. Ordinary voters sat through hours of Trump’s alternating litanies of narcissistic grievance and self-adulation and then said of a man who, by his wealth and lifestyle is unlike almost any other American, “He’s like one of us.”10 As the scholar Eliot Cohen wrote, the most disturbing possibility is not that these voters were hoodwinked, but that they were right, and that they were, in fact, much like Trump. “American culture,” he wrote in early 2016, is “nastier, more nihilistic, and far less inhibited than ever before. It breeds alternating bouts of cynicism and hysteria, and now it has given us Trump.” This, Cohen, argued, was a symptom of cultural and moral rot, and whatever Trump’s personal pathologies, his rise was “only one among many signs that something has gone profoundly amiss in our popular culture.”11

Not everyone who voted for Trump was a narcissist and not everyone who voted against him was Mother Teresa, and American liberals have their own brand of narcissistic dysfunction and celebrity worship. The adulation of former president Barack Obama, for example, at times became indistinguishable from a personality cult, such as when Newsweek ran a cover story referring to Obama’s second term as “The Second Coming.” This might have been easy to dismiss as a poor editorial choice, except that four years earlier, Newsweek’s editor, Evan Thomas, greeted Obama’s first election by saying on MSNBC, “I mean in a way, Obama’s standing above the country, above the world, he’s sort of God.”12

Another less serious but unsettling example was the self-help guru Marianne Williamson ending up onstage during the Democratic Party’s 2020 primary debates, a spectacle possible only because Williamson, a wildly popular author before her presidential run, managed to clear the initial low polling bar for inclusion. Williamson made it through two rounds of debates, and her campaign outlasted some of the party veterans, despite her participation devolving into airy pronouncements about “harnessing love for political purposes.” In the end, Democrats nominated an establishment figure in Joe Biden, but even to see Williamson on the stage was a tableau from a new American political landscape.

If narcissism were confined to small pockets of self-absorbed citizens or limited to a particular demographic or socioeconomic background, the threat to democracy would be more easily contained by the numerical realities of voting. Narcissism, however, is spreading in the United States and abroad. Twenge and Campbell—in language now even more uncomfortable after the arrival of the coronavirus—wondered whether the epidemic of narcissism in the United States could become a global pandemic.

We already know that both individual Americans and our shared culture are becoming more narcissistic over time. Thus a host is in place. And narcissism has a means of transmission through the media and the Internet. The narcissistic behavior that brings attention to one person can, through the magic of the Internet, be spread instantly around the globe. Other cultures are increasingly becoming infected with narcissism, becoming hosts for the fast-moving virus of egotism, materialism, celebrity worship, entitlement, and self-centeredness. As epidemiologists can tell you, a virus that spreads from many people and many points can quickly overtake an entire population.

Using a disease model and comparing the outbreak of narcissism to the increase in obesity from poor eating habits, the authors warned that “it is much easier to spread narcissism than fast-food restaurants.”13 Much like junk food, narcissism is destroying our communal health.

YOUR HATE HAS MADE YOU POWERFUL

Anger is bad for you. We know this from medical science. While it sometimes provides a release of tension, long periods of anger damage your heart, marinate you in stress hormones, raise your blood pressure, and harm your relationships. But anger also feels good—sometimes, really good. Rage is liberating, empowering. This is a part of our makeup as human beings and central to our myths of good and evil. “Let the hate flow through you,” the evil Emperor Palpatine of the Star Wars saga cackles as he tries to turn the young Luke Skywalker to the Dark Side. “Your hate has made you powerful.”

Hate is power, but it is also poison to liberal democracies. And yet liberal democratic societies are immersed in it, hijacked by a diffuse and nihilistic rage that seems to exist for its own sake. A 2019 poll found that two-thirds of Americans are “angry about the way things are going in the country,” over 60 percent are angrier over current events than they were five years before, and 58 percent say that their friends and family are angrier too. At 74 percent, Democrats were the angriest of all—an understandable reaction from a party mostly out of power until the congressional elections of 2018. But over half of Republicans reported feeling angry as well, with majorities of both Democrats and Republicans feeling “like a stranger in my own country.”14

This is not a phenomenon unique to the United States. In 2019, the Gallup organization found that over a fifth of respondents across 142 countries said they felt angry, a slight increase from 2017 and a new record since the first such survey was conducted in 2006.15 Armenia and Iraq were at the head of the pack with the angriest populations, while Chad and Mozambique led in perceptions of worry and stress. Still, the Americans made a strong showing. “Even as their economy roared,” Gallup pollsters noted in 2018,

more Americans were stressed, angry and worried last year than they have been at most points during the past decade. Asked about their feelings the previous day, the majority of Americans (55%) in 2018 said they had experienced stress during a lot of the day, nearly half (45%) said they felt worried a lot and more than one in five (22%) said they felt anger a lot.16

Even if we consider that Americans were about as angry as everyone else in the world, this is a remarkable finding in itself, considering that people in most other countries in the world have more reasons to be angry than most Americans. But Americans were also 6 percent more likely than people in other nations to express worry, and a whopping 20 percent more likely to report stress, a number that puts the United States on the same level as Greece, Iran, and Uganda—and three points of ahead of Venezuela, a country that is both a political and economic disaster.

Cross-cultural comparisons of emotion are always tricky, but there is almost a ridiculousness to this level of stress and anger in the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world. These emotions are especially challenging for a democratic government when citizens report that they are miserable while at the same time explaining that they are also quite happy, a finding that complicates locating actual solutions to these general anxieties. In early 2020, for example, Gallup found that “nine in 10 Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in their personal life, a new high in Gallup’s four-decade trend,” and topping the previous high of 88 percent recorded in 2003, five years before the Great Recession.17 Two-thirds, in fact, are very satisfied with their lives. Of course, being rich helps; the very happiest Americans are those who make over $100,000 a year. But even among the least-affluent respondents—those who make under $40,000 a year—80 percent are satisfied with their lives, and over half are very satisfied. Wealthy, married Republicans report being the happiest of all, while “lower-income Americans, Democrats and those who are unmarried report more tepid satisfaction,” but the bottom line, according to Gallup, is that the “vast majority of Americans in all major demographic and political subgroups are content with the way their lives are going.”

How can people be happy and furious at the same time? One explanation is that the people who are happy and the people who are furious are not the same people. But polling—and voting behavior—suggests that this is not true. Social anger and personal satisfaction seem to coexist side by side in multiple groups of voters, who report great happiness while voting for some of the angriest populist candidates.

A better explanation is that human beings are bad at assessing risk, at judging the state of the economy, or at estimating their own welfare relative to others, and always have been. Citizens tend to judge the state of the world by who they think is running it at any given moment. At the 2016 Republican convention, for example, the journalist Michael Grunwald noted that the “delegates all seem to agree the Obama economy is a ghastly mess. Except for the economy wherever they happen to live.”18 This could have been written about almost any American political gathering over the past half century; as a 2010 Pew study noted, Democrats and Republicans reversed positions on the state of the economy after the Great Recession—that is, after Democratic candidate Barack Obama’s election—with Republicans far more pessimistic and Democrats far more upbeat, even though Democrats had lower incomes, less wealth, and suffered more job losses during the recession.19 Likewise, American citizens over the years regularly report being satisfied with the quality of life in their communities while thinking the country is on the wrong track.

At this point you may be congratulating me for discovering something called “ordinary human emotions.” And yet there is something wrong when an affluent democracy like the United States has a constant high voltage of anger running through its political veins regardless of actual local or national conditions. Indeed, “anger” might not be a big enough word to capture the sourness of American civic life. In 2019, the scholar Arthur Brooks worried that Americans had blown past mere “incivility” or “intolerance” only to arrive at “something far worse: contempt, which is a noxious brew of anger and disgust. And not just contempt for other people’s ideas, but also for other people.”20 Many of us are no longer angry about any particular condition of our lives, or about any particular policy with which we disagree. We are now a more foul-tempered version of Banfield’s villagers, immersed not only in amoral and transactional politics, but gripped as well by the contemptuous dismissal of everyone who is not part of our family or trusted circle.

I am not immune to this feeling. A few years ago, I gave a lecture on the problem of expertise and democracy at a prestigious university in a beautiful but geographically remote region, and at dinner with the faculty afterward, we began to talk about the politics of America’s rural areas and small towns. Despite the fact that I personally came from a relatively small city and working-class roots, I was fed up, I said, with the recalcitrance of a minority of Americans whose electoral behavior seemed utterly hostile to everything from civil rights to basic science. Some of the academics at the table nodded along, but one of the professors who did not share my views eyed me for a moment and said, “Your contempt for the voters is palpable.”

I was taken aback. I noted that his contempt for urban and more liberal voters was just as evident—because it was—and after more discussion about what we deplored among which groups of voters, we moved on. But my colleague was right. I not only felt disconnected from voters with whom I disagreed, but I had given up on them and viewed them, if not with contempt, with disdain. (For his part, my colleague was convinced that his deeply hostile view of liberal voters was rooted in moral righteousness about issues like abortion and free speech and therefore completely reasonable.) I had to think seriously about my own failings because his comment struck a chord that I could not deny. I still think about it.

There are always reasons in a democracy to be dissatisfied, angry, or even enraged. Sometimes, we are fed up when local authorities are squandering tax payments while uncollected garbage sits on the streets. More severe problems, from the mismanagement of the economy to the bungling of a military conflict, can and should produce a tidal wave at the ballot box. And some wounds—such as the delayed promises of equality to women and minorities—will call justifiably enraged citizens into the streets to demand actions from recalcitrant authorities who have been in power too comfortably and too long.

But anger should not be the default condition of a democratic electorate. In our current political era, especially since the end of the Cold War and the subsequent rise of a powerful and wealthy America, drama and anger have become the normal state of affairs, and these emotions have supplanted deliberation and compromise. They leave no room for reasoned debate about policy, which is complicated and boring. As Lilla has put it: “Romantics chafe at this undramatic conception of politics. They prefer to think of it as a zero-sum confrontation—the People against Power, or Civilization against the Mob. And it’s not hard to see why. What could be more stirring . . . ? And what could be more dreary than the history of parties and public administration and treaties?”21

Instead, citizens now elevate political differences to existential struggles, because to do so makes for a more interesting and all-consuming confrontation between good and evil. In 2016, for example, future Trump appointee Michael Anton dubbed the coming presidential contest the “Flight 93 Election.” He argued that the voters, like the passengers of that doomed plane on 9/11, must rush the cockpit and risk the possible damage of Donald Trump in order to stop the certain death represented by Hillary Clinton.22 This was not only an inept metaphor, but one that ought to be deeply offensive to any sensible person after 9/11. In something of a mea culpa four years later, the conservative evangelical writer Erick Erickson admitted to his own capture by such a mentality: “I really was one of those people who believed every election was an existential crisis and we were on the verge of destruction. I cannot bring myself to lie to you. I used to really believe the nation would collapse if Obama or Clinton or Biden got elected.”23

It should not have been a surprise, however, that this odious sophistry found a home in the American political lexicon. For years, each election has been cast by partisans as “the most important election in our lifetime,” the last charge out of the trenches, after which there would be nothing left and no second chances.24 The distance from a “Flight 93 election” to “other citizens are literal monsters” is not nearly as far as we might hope. As the conservative writer David French said in 2020, “conspiracy theories are nothing new in American life.”

Behind it all is a simple conviction, an unstated premise that lends credibility to any claim, however outlandish: “they” are so evil and so loathsome that they’d happily unleash an epidemic on the world or crush the livelihoods of millions merely to obtain a political advantage. These are not the convictions of a healthy society. These are the convictions of people consumed by rage and fear.25

Right-wing populists of the early twenty-first century have raised apocalyptic rhetoric to an art form. (To his credit, French is not one of them; he has been attacked by his former comrades on the right with shocking personal smears for his writings.) But it has become something of a tradition over several decades for Americans of all persuasions to talk in this way not just about elections, but about almost everything.

These apocalyptic narratives are dramatic nonsense. They undermine the sober reflection and deliberation that sustain democracies. The especially vexing irony here is that citizens seek out this turbocharged drama in politics not because things are bad, but precisely because life is generally good and there is usually not that much at stake in any one election. When we face ennui and relative comfort, we make up for the emptiness by replacing ordinary politics with the emotions we would normally bring to bear in wartime. We cease to be citizens so that we may imagine ourselves as crusaders. As Eric Hoffer wrote: “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. . . . Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless.”26 When politics becomes a crusade, citizens are no longer merely going about the mundane business of choosing representatives, they are donning suits of shining armor that make them, if only for a day, the most important human beings who have ever lived.

The addiction to political drama is especially tempting because it combines with narcissism to provide people with rationalizations that make life’s humiliating pains and tribulations seem like part of a grand adventure. Losing a job, for example, is traumatic. (Yes, I’ve experienced it, and I have suffered the depression that comes with it.) Losing a job because “the system is broken” transforms a personal tragedy into a national cause. To be mugged in the street is terrifying (and I’ve experienced that, too), but to be mugged because “society is breaking down” elevates the experience from a police report to a war.

Even something as prosaic as being on the wrong side of an election—and who hasn’t experienced that?—is unpleasant and disappointing, but to lose an election because “everything is rigged against people like me” turns an electoral loss into a cause for revolution in the name of the oppressed. (Sometimes it’s more than disappointing. When I was a teenager, my mother ran for re-election to a local office in our small city. I was her campaign’s deputized observer at the vote count, and I had to go home and deliver the news to the candidate—my own mother—that she’d lost.) Why should any of us accept any of these indignities as part of the many vicissitudes of life in a large, open society, when we can instead cast ourselves as warriors securing the gates against the barbarians?

In politics, anger can propel otherwise untalented politicians and meaningless campaigns to victory. It is an emotion, however, that tends to be short-lived. It burns brightly and then burns out. The more durable and lasting fuel for illiberal politics is resentment, the reflexive expression of envy and ego that drives human beings to view political life not as a requirement for cooperation, but as an opportunity for revenge.

THE POWER OF RESENTMENT

Resentment in politics is the externalization of envy. If there is one thing authoritarian governments do especially well, it is the way in which they mobilize resentment as a weapon. Democracy, on principle, is based on the public’s acceptance of regular cycles in which winners and losers exchange places, sometimes unexpectedly. Authoritarians, by contrast, promise stability and equality. They offer placidity by promising, without favor or exception, to make losers of everyone outside of the ruling group. By reducing all citizens to the same miserable condition, they build a constituency among those who are willing to endure oppression as long as the people they hate have to endure it as well. Resentment is about leveling rather than leadership, about vengeance rather than virtue.

Resentment, like narcissism, undermines the civic virtues of tolerance, cooperation, and equal justice, because it fuels demands for rewards and punishments based on jealousy and unhappiness rather than reason or impartial justice. It is more than just irritation at the success of others; it is an anti-democratic desire to see those others torn down in the name of “equality.” There is a more evocative word, ressentiment (imported from French by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche), that captures this vague but powerful envy of others. Mere “envy” or “resentment” isn’t enough to express the lasting toxicity of ressentiment. As the writer Joseph Epstein has explained, ordinary resentment is a “quick, stabbing thing, set off by an act of ingratitude or injustice, but that can, fairly quickly, melt away.”

But ressentiment is of greater endurance, has a way of insinuating itself into personality, becoming a permanent part of one’s character. Ressentiment, then, is a state of mind, one that leaves those it possesses with a general feeling of grudgingness toward life. . . . So much so that those suffering ressentiment come almost to enjoy the occasions for criticism that their outlook allows them.27

If you’re an academic (like me), Epstein has a particularly uncomfortable example of how people in a perfectly comfortable profession like mine can be happy and yet still itch with ressentiment about others whose talents seem more valued than our own. “Why does some ignorant lawyer have enough money to buy a villa in Tuscany when one knows so much more about the art of the Italian Renaissance? What kind of society permits this state of things to exist? A seriously unjust one, that’s what kind.”28

Ouch.

This sort of thinking—and as an academic, I admit to nothing here—is why the philosopher Ian Buchanan describes ressentiment as a “vengeful, petty-minded state of being that does not so much want what others have (although that is partly it) as want others to not have what they have.”29 (Epstein himself seemed to suffer from the same affliction in 2020 when he unburdened himself at length about the new First Lady, Jill Biden, using the title “doctor” because she has a doctorate in education.)30 Or, in the words of the German philosopher Max Scheler, it is existential envy “directed against the other person’s very nature,” and thus unresolvable: “I can forgive everything, but not that you are—that you are what you are—that I am not what you are—indeed that I am not you.”31 Citizens engulfed by ressentiment seek to bring others down to what they think is their own underappreciated station and to identify scapegoats to bear the blame for their own sense of inadequacy, and to answer for the oppression, real or imagined, they feel has befallen them.

Note that both the right and left in the United States think the other suffers from ressentiment and is out to inflict its revenge. “Our society is shot through with Nietzschean ressentiment,” the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg said in 2015, while Alan Wolfe, an avowed liberal, declared in 2018 that ressentiment is just another way of describing the “populism of the right.” Sadly, they both have a point.32

There is a very old joke about this kind of social resentment in the context of a peasant culture. I have heard versions of this joke in both Greece and Russia, but it can be found almost anywhere: God summons people of various nationalities, including a peasant, and offers to grant their greatest wish. Other nationalities wish for greatness for their nations, but the peasant asks nothing more than for God to kill his better-off neighbor’s plow horse. (A variation of this joke has a genie offering the peasant anything he wants, but whatever it is, his neighbor will get twice as much, so the peasant says, “Poke out one of my eyes.”)

In the 1988 American film Mississippi Burning, the screenwriter Chris Gerolmo used a much darker version of this parable in his fictionalized account of the actual murders of three civil rights workers in 1963. Two FBI agents, one an idealist from Robert Kennedy’s new Justice Department and the other an older man who had served as a sheriff in the Deep South before joining the Bureau, are discussing why there is so much hatred in the rural South. The older agent tells a story from his childhood about how his father secretly killed the mule of a prospering African American neighbor, eventually driving him to leave town, because his white father could not bear being inferior to a Black man. “Is that an excuse?” the young agent asks, appalled. “No,” the older man says. “It’s not an excuse. It’s just a story about my daddy.”

Gerolmo’s script was meant to represent a particular kind of hatred and racial animus in the Jim Crow era in the American South. But his depiction of ressentiment, of hating the idea that others whom we despise might do better than ourselves, could apply to any number of cultures and times. Sadly, however, the racial version is still alive and well in the United States. In 2019, the psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl conducted research among poor and middle-class white voters in an attempt to figure out why they were supporting “political positions that directly harmed their own health and well-being or the health and well-being of their own families.”33 What he found was that cultural and racial resentments among these voters were stronger even than a sense of self-preservation. Metzl wrote of his discussions, for example, with a 41-year-old Tennessean named Trevor who was dying of liver disease brought on by “years of hard partying” and hepatitis C. “Ain’t no way I would ever support Obamacare or sign up for it,” Trevor told Metzl. “I would rather die.” Trevor was adamant that his tax dollars—despite the fact that he was broke, unemployed, and unlikely to be paying any taxes at all—would go to “Mexicans and welfare queens.”34

Metzl called this phenomenon “dying of whiteness,” a blend of racism and an attachment to myths about independence and masculinity. These beliefs are exploited by cynical populists, who feed simmering resentment among people who are neither independent nor particularly privileged because of their race. But the appeal is about more than race. It is the idea that others, whether racial minorities, immigrants, or the far-away city dwellers, are doing better, somehow at the expense of the “real” Americans who pay the bills but get none of the benefits. This is equality achieved by destroying the playing field rather than leveling it. If Trevor can’t have a new liver without risking accidentally giving care to someone who does not look like Trevor, so be it: no one gets one.

These attitudes are not limited to the rural poor. A 2011 study of “Tea Party” populist conservatives of the early twenty-first century, for example, found that these voters—spread throughout the United States, older, white, mostly male, and middle-class—shared Trevor’s destructive beliefs but stopped short of being willing to sacrifice themselves to make the point. Indeed, these more affluent citizens showed “considerable acceptance, even warmth, toward long-standing federal social programs like Social Security and Medicare” to which they felt “legitimately entitled.” Rather, their opposition to programs like the Affordable Care Act was concentrated on “resentment of perceived federal government ‘handouts’ to ‘undeserving’ groups, the definition of which seems heavily influenced by racial and ethnic stereotypes.”35

A more prosaic example of this kind of resentment in modern America is the voter in Florida who was furloughed from her public sector job during a 2019 budget impasse between the White House and Congress. Initially a supporter of President Trump, she turned on her candidate in helpless anger. “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting” (emphasis added).36 By 2021, this call to “hurt the right people” was a literal call for violence. As the assault on the U.S. Capitol was being repelled by police, a crying, hysterical protester said in bewilderment: “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot [Black Lives Matter protesters], but they’re shooting the patriots.” A man nearby said: “Don’t worry, honey. We showed them today. We showed them what we’re all about.”37

Democracy is always replete with calls to tax the rich and disempower the powerful—almost by default, because there are so few of them and so many of everyone else. But the more generic idea that candidates have an obligation to hurt others, to punish one’s enemies, is different. Populist voters in the modern democracies have no interest in wonky policy debates and are happy to see leaders like Trump, or Berlusconi in Italy, or Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, promise to hurt the right people—in some cases, actually to shoot them—whoever they are.

This urge to punish others can overwhelm simple calculations about self-interest. In a famous work titled What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the leftist writer Thomas Frank asked nearly twenty years ago why so many poorer Americans, especially in the rural heartland, were willing to ally themselves with political movements on the right rather than with those on the left that were more likely to help them. Conservative writers, of course, have asked the same question about staggeringly high levels of minority commitment to the Democratic Party, but the answer there is at least partly obvious: minority voters know they’re getting a better deal from one party than the other, both in the larger protection of their rights and in the prosaic question of resources directed to their communities. Frank, by contrast, was trying to explain why people in dying towns insisted on praising the very people intent on supporting economic policies that were “grinding those small towns back into the red-state dust.”38

Interestingly, despite Frank’s politics as a man of the left, some of his observations match those of conservative critics of “culture rot.” Frank was struck by a moment, for example, at the homecoming parade at Emporia State University in the late 1990s. “A fraternity boy in an enormous black cowboy hat,” Frank recalls, “shouted out to his best gal” as he passed by on a float:

He: Where’s my sweatshirt?

She (lifting sweatshirt to flash him): It’s right here, bitch.39

College kids do stupid things. But, as Frank notes, “you probably haven’t heard much about this aspect of the heartland” because Mardi Gras–like behavior in a small town in Kansas is the “kind of blight [that] can’t be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy.” He points the finger directly at a capitalist system that treats towns in Kansas as collateral damage in the search for profit.

The economic explanation, however, only goes so far (and, in fairness to Frank, he has a lot more to say on the relationship between capitalism and culture). This kind of behavior helps drive political resentment when the parents, or more likely the grandparents, of the students at Emporia State realize that their heirs have become part of some new culture they detest. They resent what they see as cultural decay, but they would rather not think about the source of that decay, especially if it means looking inward. Their beloved granddaughter isn’t exposing herself on the street because something went wrong at home or in their community; it’s a large, nebulous thing called the culture that was created by someone else, and is therefore, by definition, someone else’s fault.

The unfocused rage at the culture, at the elites, or at some other culprit is not just a distraction; it provides a wellspring of political energy that savvy operators exploit by affixing it to hot button moral issues. An anti-abortion activist in Kansas, for example, admitted as much bluntly to Frank: “You can’t stir the general public up to get out to work for a candidate on taxes or the economy. People today are busy. But you can get people who are concerned about the moral decline in our nation. Upset enough to where you can motivate them on the abortion issue, those type of things.”40

“People are busy”—but not too busy to invest in pure fury about “those type of things,” issues that are morally important but that are more of a symptom rather than a cause of their world collapsing around them. Frank captures the seething ressentiment about culture among older, well-off Kansans of the early twenty-first century in a passage written long before the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections that is worth quoting here at length.

The angry men that I knew personally were not aggrieved blue-collar folks, by any means. They were all fairly successful people, self-made men who had done quite well in their fields of accounting or construction or sales—the sort of folks who are supposed to regard American life with a certain satisfaction, not infinite bitterness. And yet something had gone so wrong for them in the [1960s]—and had stayed so steadfastly wrong ever since—that life had permanently lost its luster. It’s not that they had any real material beef with the world. These guys were comfortable and prosperous. But the culture—the everyday environment they lived in—rankled them the way pollen affects someone with hay fever. Their favorite magazines, movie heroes, and politicians would never let them forget it, either, parading before them an ever-swelling cavalcade of grievances: tales of foul-mouthed kids, crime in the streets, foolish professors, and sitcom provocations, each one sending them deeper and deeper into the fever swamps of bitterness.41

This is the same sense that European observers have noted among the middle-class populists of Poland, the UK, Italy, and elsewhere. American conservatives, for their part, would likely agree that whatever galls them began sometime in the 1960s, but it’s been a long time since those days, and college girls in Emporia born sometime in the 1980s (a time their grandfathers probably liked well enough) did not end up acting trashily in public because of hippies or rioters in the 1960s. Something else went wrong—something inside the culture itself of their own homes and families—and they know it.

Liberals who might feel satisfaction at the idea of ressentiment driving right-wing populism should pause for a moment to consider their own contributions to the same problem. As Edward Luce has pointed out, the West’s urban liberal establishment pays “lip service” to progressive ideas that mask their own resentful separation from other citizens. The global middle class might hate the new generations of enlightened city dwellers, but a lot of those urbanites hate the middle class right back, even if they are more muted and polite about it. For all the talk of multicultural egalitarianism, the well-off are perfectly comfortable with the reality of a new urban oligarchy. “We really couldn’t ask for a nicer elite,” Luce notes drily, but “the effects of how they spend their money are hardly progressive.”42

Nor should liberals forget how much of left-wing populism is motivated by a similar culture of irresolvable grievance. Lilla, for one, argues that modern liberalism apes the selfish and resentful individualism of the right, but does so under the cover of rigid and obsessive divisions on race, ethnicity, and gender. This “narcissism with attitude,” Lilla said in one of many comments that likely infuriated his fellow liberals, is essentially “Reaganism for lefties.”43 Worse, in the perverse world of tribal extremism, neither side has much of an interest in winning. Escalating demands for power come from losses, not triumphs, and so the strategy is to stay in the fight, deny the reality of incremental victories, and maintain the permanent and valued status of “victim.”

The grievances of the left are different from the ressentiment of the populist right, however, because American culture—indeed, global popular culture, at least in the developed world—is primarily a liberal culture. Liberals cannot plausibly claim to be losers in the “culture wars” any more than conservatives can claim that they have lost the struggle to define capitalism, a contest they won at least forty years ago. Liberal grievances nonetheless produce claims that are hard for democracies to cope with, because in the teleology of the left, equality is as unreachable a goal as rolling back the clock on the culture is for the disaffected right.

The United States and other established democracies long believed they had succeeded in harnessing the power of envy, replacing victimhood with citizenship, and restraining the dragons of resentment. This optimism was buoyed by the ability of dynamic market economies to paper over these emotional dangers with high growth and material plenty. But voters afflicted with ressentiment view life, and not just the race for material wealth, as a rigged competition. Like the villagers of Banfield’s “Montegrano,” Americans view education with suspicion and envy because esteem and self-respect, too, are now a zero-sum game. Anyone who does better than anyone else, in any way, is clearly using brains or connections or some other magical device to get ahead, to secure more benefits, and to look down on others.

In a democracy, and especially one with free markets aimed at ever-growing consumer consumption, people get what they want, and, as it turns out, getting what they want makes them miserable. This produces both powerlessness and guilt. There is nothing the business leaders of Kansas can do to make their granddaughters put on their sweatshirts in public and stop talking like reality-show Mafia wives; they can only feel humiliation that it has happened and wince at the suspicion that they themselves might have had something to do with it. And while they cannot vote to elevate themselves and better their own culture, they can vote to impose solutions on others that will make everyone else as miserable as they are. In a corroded, unvirtuous society, that might be good enough.

NOSTALGIA: THEY’RE TEARING DOWN TIM RILEY’S BAR

Finally, it is important here to say a word about nostalgia, the powerful emotion that alternately taunts and comforts us with memories—true or false—of a better life in the past. It is an emotion, strangely, that can produce warm feelings even about terrible times once such days are far enough in the past and can be revisited with a sense of safety. And sometimes it produces a yearning for times that never were, providing a new narrative not only about how much better the past was, but also about who is to blame for the ruinous condition of the present. This latter kind of memory, to use the Russian writer Svetlana Boym’s term, is “restorative” nostalgia; Americans (and, as Anne Applebaum notes, a fair number of Britons and other Europeans) have been in its grip for years.44

Nostalgia is common among both people and societies, especially after traumatic changes. American popular culture in the 1970s—that is, in the wake of the upheaval of the 1960s—included beloved 1950s period comedies like M*A*S*H, in which the Korean War was used as a gentle and comic allegory about Vietnam, and Happy Days, in which the fifties were recreated as a gauzy memory of a happy and prosperous Middle America. The 1950s craze eventually subsided, and television went on to handle the 1960s a bit more gingerly. Tour of Duty, a series about a U.S. Army platoon in Vietnam, appeared in 1987 in the wake of the Best Picture Oscar win for Oliver Stone’s Platoon. A year later, The Wonder Years premiered; set in the late 1960s, it was more about childhood sweethearts than about the 1960s. A decade later the seventies got an idealized, Happy Days–style treatment in That 70s Show. A highly successful look at adults in the 1960s, a glamorized depiction of martini-guzzling Manhattan ad agency executives titled Mad Men, would not appear until the early twenty-first century.

Rage, however, occasionally peeks out of these previous periods of nostalgia, an important reminder that the choleric nostalgia of the current era is neither new nor unique. In 1970, for example, the television icon Rod Serling penned an Emmy-nominated episode of his gothic horror anthology, Night Gallery, that was out of character for a show that was usually about ghouls and vampires. In “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar,” aired in 1971, a widowed, alcoholic plastics company executive named Randy Lane is on the verge of being forced out of his position after twenty-five years. Randy then learns that Tim Riley’s, the long-closed bar where he celebrated his homecoming from World War II, where he danced with his wife and sang with his father, is about to go under the wrecking ball to make way for a bank. Randy descends into delusion, summoning the ghosts of the dead as he tries to return to the world of 1945.

Serling, a World War II combat veteran himself, was a writer consumed with nostalgia, and “Tim Riley’s Bar” was one of his most personal scripts. It echoed some of his earlier work in which harried, middle-aged men somehow magically visit a simpler and happier time.45 But Randy Lane’s rage against the modern world in 1970, as the bar crumbles around him and the ghosts fade away, sounds almost exactly like the angry populist venting, especially of men, in the 2000s.

I rate something better than I got! . . . Hey, I’ve put in my time. Understand? I’ve paid my dues. I shouldn’t have to get hustled to death in the daytime and die of loneliness every night. That’s not the dream! That’s not what it’s all about!

I can’t survive out there! Pop? Tim? They stacked the deck that way! They fix it so you get elbowed off the earth! You just don’t understand what’s going on out there now! The whole bloody world is coming apart at the seams!

At the close of the episode, as the wrecking ball closes in, Randy is saved at the last minute by his secretary and finally acknowledged by his company. This was a standard television happy ending, but lead actor William Windom and others recall that Serling wrote an earlier version in which Randy, alone and defeated, stands outside of the demolished bar in a soaking rain.46

Perhaps not coincidentally, 1971 was also the year in which the landmark series All in the Family made its debut on network television. The centerpiece of most episodes was the intergenerational conflict between Archie Bunker, the middle-aged, right-wing patriarch of an outer-borough New York family, and his hopelessly liberal son-in-law. The theme to All in the Family was written by the Broadway composers Charles Strouse and Lee Adams—both born in the 1920s—and while it was jaunty and hummable, it evoked the nostalgia of millions of real people just like the fictional Queens factory worker. Each week, the show opened with Archie and his wife Edith at the piano, singing Strouse and Adams’s melancholy hymn to a world only thirty or forty years in the past. Misty eyed and holding a cigar as he sang, Archie invoked Glenn Miller, Herbert Hoover, a world where “men were men,” and his family’s old LaSalle automobile, which “ran great.”

The LaSalle was introduced in the Roaring Twenties and went out of production thirty years before the premiere of All in the Family. But viewers understood why Archie was grieving in a world that was now full of Japanese Datsuns and Toyotas and German Volkswagen Beetles, a countercultural symbol that Americans of the time associated with young people. Edith, played by veteran actress Jean Stapleton, would bang away at the keys, smiling and content, but Carroll O’Connor, who played Archie, would look away in a reverie, lost in a time when men like him still mattered. At the close, the couple would lean against each other and smile.

It was all very heartwarming, if you didn’t think too much about the heartbroken lyrics underneath the catchy tune. And indeed, the second verse was so dark it wasn’t even used in the show. A lament about “freaks,” who belonged in a circus, long hair and short skits, and how it’s all gone wrong, Serling’s Randy Lane couldn’t have said it better. (The theme to Happy Days, by contrast, was a fluffy, perky homage to early 1950s rock written by two other reliable hitmakers, Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel, that broke into the top 10 on American pop charts in 1976.)

All in the Family, unlike the other programs of its time, was a constant argument between the past and the present about who was to blame for everything being terrible. And yet Americans could smile at Archie Bunker’s bitter nostalgia because so many American families had an Archie in it that they knew and loved—my own father was pretty close—and, perhaps even more to the point, because no one really wanted Herbert Hoover to be president again. The Depression was within living memory, and viewers knew that Glenn Miller died over the skies of Europe during World War II.

Just as Archie was making his way into American living rooms, real life was imitating art, but in a considerably more violent way. Just six months before All in the Family premiered, a riot broke out in New York City between construction workers on one side and college student protesters on the other. Known as “the hardhat riot” (also called “Bloody Friday” in New York), scores of people were injured when hundreds of construction workers building the nearby World Trade Center waded into a crowd of several hundred students and other protesters picketing the Vietnam War in front of the New York Stock Exchange. The New York City Police, hardly fans of the students, were too few to stop the violence even had they been so inclined—which they assuredly were not.

Over the next two weeks, the union workers and other groups held their own rallies, including a gathering of some 150,000 people in front of City Hall in Manhattan. Their grievance at the time—now remembered as a golden age for American workers—was indistinguishable from the same battle cries of their grandchildren a half century later. “Nobody has been speaking to the average worker,” one woman who supported the hardhats said after the riot. “Nobody cares what we want or how we feel.”47 It mattered little to such aggrieved voters that Richard Nixon, the choice and champion of the “Silent Majority,” had already been president for almost two years and would be returned to office in 1972 in an electoral landslide.

Americans (and a fair number of Europeans) today once again sound as anguished as Archie Bunker or Randy Lane, or as angry as the hardhats of lower Manhattan. This is because they, too, are once again obsessed with irrational nostalgia. As the scholars Edoardo Campanella and Marta Dassù wrote in 2019, this attachment to restorative, delusional nostalgia is now spreading throughout the developed world.

The world is marching backwards into the future. More and more countries are becoming trapped in a past that no longer exists—and probably never really existed at all. Millions of people, particularly in advanced economies, believe that life was better fifty years ago: job opportunities abounded, local communities were intact, and the pace of technological change was under control.

The age of nostalgia has begun. It is an age of false myths, unparalleled political miscalculations, and rising tensions between nations—a time of regression and pessimism.48

Some of this is the product of an aging population, but the idealization of the past is also, they point out, now mobilized by “jingoistic leaders” as “an emotional weapon in the political debate.” The young, meanwhile, howl against the injustices of the past while wishing they could go back and live in it—or, at least, in the parts they think they’d like.

Nostalgia is an insidious challenge for almost any form of government, or at least for those that have not perfected time travel. Authoritarian systems handle such emotions by squashing expressions of dissatisfaction while also pandering to the public with triumphal stories of the past and identification of the betrayers and scapegoats who must be punished for any misery in the present. Democratic regimes have no such alternatives. They can only defend the state of the present, admit its shortcomings, and promise to do better. If the demand from the public, however, is to return to an imagined past in 1970 or 1980 or 1990, any government, no matter how responsive, will find itself on a treadmill that will produce exhaustion and eventual collapse.

A serious people know the difference between righteous anger and resentful rage, between material deprivation and unmet wants, and between reality and nostalgia. But when an entire population slides after years of peace and plenty into narcissism and resentment and entertains itself with comforting lies about the past in order to avoid the responsibilities of the present, the political environment sinks into a corrosive slurry that eats away at the foundations of democracy. Most dangerous of all, in such conditions even a great people will be unable to handle the trials that inevitably befall every nation, including (as we now see) a pandemic. Such challenges require sacrifice, stoicism, and civic commitment; instead, many Americans want a full apology for a twenty-first century that has somehow not measured up to their expectations. This inability to deal with adversity has crippled the ability of many of the democracies, the United States among them, to respond to real problems.

We turn to those issues in the next chapter.