No country for upbeat men
America is afflicted with a disease. Its defining characteristic is relentless negativity. Everything is awful. We’re living in the worst time ever. Things couldn’t possibly get worse.
This piece in the New York Times really got me thinking comprehensively about this disease. It’s something I have written about before. Sometimes, it has been in reference to the mindset of doomerism that has taken over the left-wing advocacy world. Other times, it has been in reference to the aggrieved, zero sum worldview of Trump and most Republican primary voters.
My own worldview is very different. I’m not a blind optimist, but I hate doomerism and zero sum thinking. More broadly, I’m against the idea of determinism. As I write about regularly, predicting the future, especially about large scale events, is not something any of us are good at. That’s why you will almost never find me prognosticating about much of anything.
I don’t like the idea that things are set in stone. Believing that because X has happened under Y circumstances in the past, that means anything else is impossible is a major logical fallacy that keeps getting disproven over and over again. Still, people cling to it and are as confident as ever that they know what will happen, whether it’s the economy, elections or anything else.[i]
This piece is not about predicting the future. It’s about the rampant pessimism and doom and gloom that has afflicted a large majority of us. It’s an important subject because it’s (a) objectively unfounded, (b) selectively applied, (c) a problem not just for Biden, but for the country and its future, and (d) it’s not obvious what it will take to get past it other than the passage of time and good fortune.
The author of the piece is Damon Linker. If you’re not a political junkie, you probably have no idea who he is. He writes a regular newsletter on Substack and has been a columnist for other publications in the past. He is a participant on a podcast I occasionally listen to. Ideologically, he describes himself as a centrist Democrat and on substance I tend to find myself in agreement with him far more often than not. He’s someone I like and respect, which is why I’m partially responding to what he wrote.
The first thing Linker points to is the percentage of Americans saying the country is on the wrong track. A vast majority say it is. A majority have said the country is on the wrong track since I was finishing high school. The number saying the country is on the right track slowly went up during the Obama and Trump years before plunging during the pandemic and has remained low since inflation took off.
That fits with the main symptom of the disease. A huge majority of people think things are terrible nationally. Trust in institutions of all sorts is very low. The national economy is seen as awful. The state of education is seen as bad. Crime is seen as a major national problem that is getting worse.
One twist about negative national views is how different they are from what people say about where they live. There is a tendency for people to say things are terrible nationally, but are much better in their state, city or neighborhood. For example, a recent poll from the Wall Street Journal of seven swing states asked respondents how they thought the economy was doing nationally and how they thought it was doing in their state. The differences were stark. In every state, respondents said the state economy was doing much better than the national economy. What are the odds?
The pattern holds true with education. For two decades, Gallup has done polling on how people view the quality of K-12 education nationally versus how they view their own kids’ school and the gap is substantial. In 2022, the percentage of respondents who said they were “completely satisfied” with K-12 education nationally was 9%. However, 32% said they were “completely satisfied” with their own kids’ education.
That pattern even extends to how people view their own financial situation. As one writer put it, “Everything is terrible, but I’m fine.” A large majority of people rate their own financial situation as good despite the national economy supposedly being awful.
Linker goes through a long list of failures that have happened during the 21st century, including the financial crisis and the slow recovery that followed, the war in Iraq, the lousy public health response to the pandemic, high inflation and interest rates and a surge in crossings at the border, among others. It’s true there have been plenty of screwups over the last twenty years. I won’t argue with that. I do, however, have many issues with critics of our institutions and their responses to some of those events.
Linker says those who run our institutions haven’t taken responsibility for their failings or proposed ideas for fixing things. By institutions, he’s referring to the federal government. I’m not sure what taking responsibility would even entail. That aside, what we’ve seen is people in charge can learn from past mistakes and the economic response to the pandemic is a great example of that.
The economic response to the financial crisis was woefully inadequate and the recovery was slow because of it. That experience was internalized and the response to the pandemic was much more robust. Because of the federal government’s response, the US has come out ahead of virtually all other developed countries in terms of jobs and growth. It’s also true inflation has been a problem and those aren’t unrelated.
One downside of the robust response to the pandemic was that demand was much higher than supply. When that happens, prices will go up. The downturn from the pandemic was unique in that it impacted supply heavily, but because of stimulus measures, demand was kept afloat. There was no way to avoid a surge in inflation absent allowing demand to fall with supply, which would have likely meant a depression.
Inflation is still a lingering problem. Even though the rate of inflation is down significantly from its peak, prices are higher than they were pre-pandemic. I wish there was a way to prevent demand from collapsing while maintaining low inflation, but there wasn’t. It would be great to save the economy without any costs, but that’s not how it works.
Our institutions did learn from past mistakes and didn’t repeat them. Unfortunately, when old problems are solved, new ones can emerge and that’s what we have seen with inflation. People don’t like higher interest rates, but they won’t like what it will take for Congress to get the Fed to lower them, i.e., spending cuts and tax increases.
Tradeoffs exist and that’s something populists don’t get. Populists love to sell simplistic, black-and-white solutions to all problems. All that’s needed is one neat trick and every problem will be solved without any costs or downsides. “Elect us,” they say, “and we’ll burn it all down, wave a magic wand and everything will be perfect.”
To briefly address another one of Linker’s criticisms of institutions, let’s look at immigration. Biden has recognized that he erred in being too permissive on it. He has tried to right the ship and most congressional Democrats supported an enforcement only border bill that congressional Republicans killed in bad faith. Supporting such a bill is an acknowledgement from Democrats that they made a mistake and are trying to fix it. I don’t know if that qualifies as taking responsibility, but it’s a big step to take in the opposite direction of where Democrats were previously going.
All news is bad news
In 2020, there was a surge in homicides that continued into 2021. That got plenty of national coverage. Did you know that surge declined in 2022, 2023 and has continued to decline even further this year? I don’t fault you if you didn’t. When problems arise, they get wall-to-wall coverage, but not so much when they decline or are solved.
That probably explains why most people think crime is worse now than it was a year ago. When it concerns the national media, i.e., major news networks, cable news, national newspapers, it’s important to remember it’s heavily concentrated in New York and DC. When (bad) things happen there, they get a disproportionate amount of national attention. From watching or reading national coverage of crime you could be forgiven for thinking the only US cities are DC, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. You could also be forgiven for thinking those cities are warzones that only Kurt Russell could make it out of alive. DC aside, those cities, too, have seen big decreases in crime.
This piece here is a great rebuttal to the negativity plaguing the country. It refutes some of Linker’s arguments, but, more broadly, it explains how things have gotten better not just in the US, but around the world. Living standards have never been higher in the US or globally than they are now. Technological innovations are helping us like never before. Obesity is a big problem, for example, but with the invention of Ozempic and other similar drugs we may just be able to get it under control. Not only could those drugs have a major impact on peoples’ health, but they may also be able to help with other vices.
Like so many things, the coverage of Ozempic and similar drugs has frequently been negative. What kind of long-term effects will it have? Will it be bad for business? It costs so much, nobody can afford it!
Of all the alleged biases “the media” has, the one I think is valid is being heavily inclined towards negativity. There are very few media outlets that don’t report that way. Stories that are negative get huge coverage. Stories that are positive either get short shrift or are framed negatively.
An example of a positive story being framed negatively is this much criticized article in the Wall Street Journal from last month. The subject is falling rents in Austin. During the 2010s and especially in 2021 and 2022, Austin saw a surge in rents. Unlike cities in California, Austin made it easy to build housing. Because of that, a lot of new housing supply came online and rents have since declined. That’s how it should work.
According the article, that’s a bad thing. Huh? When rents were surging, there were countless articles published discussing the hardships it was causing for renters. That included articles published in the Wall Street Journal. Declining rents in a city with high demand for living there is a good thing, but it’s framed as if it’s a tragedy. If rents are rising it’s bad. If rents are falling it’s bad.
My intent here isn’t to pick on the Wall Street Journal. It’ a great paper and I read it regularly. The tendency to frame positive stories in a negative light is hardly unique to it.
In defense of all those in “the media,” their being biased towards negativity isn’t random or a conspiracy. I don’t even like the phrase “the media” because it’s not really a thing. There are tons of outlets doing their own work and hardly any of them coordinate together. There is a media that is geared towards every ideological leaning. “The media” is the furthest thing away from monolithic.
When I hear someone complaining about “the media,” I almost always tune it out. Even if it has validity, there is nothing anyone can do about it. The First Amendment guarantees the right to a free press and thank god for that. When someone complains about “the media,” it’s usually just lashing out, venting, making excuses, blame shifting, refusing to do any self-reflection, etc. If someone wants to do that it’s their choice, but I think it’s a waste of time.
Ultimately, the reason for why there is so much media bias towards negativity is not “the media,” it’s us. As much as people like to claim they don’t like negative stories, their actions say otherwise. “The media” reports on things negatively because that’s what we want to hear. Stories that are negative get more views and clicks than stories that are positive. That’s especially true for stories that tell us what we want to hear about people we don’t like.
Biden’s burden
Circling back to Linker’s piece, he suggests some things Biden should do to improve his standing against Trump. I give him credit for what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say Biden should rail against gender affirming care, pronouns, DEI or anything having to do with wokeness. Of all the reasons Biden could lose, wokeness doesn’t make the top trillion.
When it comes to social issues, what people care about is abortion. Nobody cares about transgender athletes, DEI workshops, gender affirming care or whatever the latest culture war fight of the hour is.[ii] When someone says Biden should speak out against wokeness, at best, they’re mistaking their own preferences for everyone else’s. Otherwise, they’re saying they live in a bubble and shouldn’t be listened to.
Some of Linker’s suggestions include Biden acknowledging that the federal government has made mistakes and pledging to try to fix things, promoting an agenda of permitting reform and housing abundance, taking the deficit seriously and trying to make the government function better. I don’t have any substantive issue with those ideas. I think Biden should do those things because they are good policy, will improve peoples’ lives and help accomplish goals that have already been enacted such as the Inflation Reduction Act.
That said, I’m skeptical it will help much electorally. In the case of housing, Biden has been good on that front, but the federal government won’t be able/willing to do much. The most important actions by far are on the state level. Biden can and should encourage that and I think it would help if he waded into races in places like San Francisco that have elections coming up featuring housing proponents against NIMBYs.
Permitting reform is another area that is critical. Clean energy is going to be perennially hobbled without it. It will have to be done on a bipartisan basis. That can be done and there are some efforts going on now. Among voters, though, I’m skeptical even 1% have any idea what permitting reform means.
Efforts to have the government run better and work faster are great. The collapsed bridge in Baltimore is a good example of why that matters. The notion that it will take years to fix should be unacceptable. There is no reason why that has to be the case. If Biden can take a hatchet to all the red tape delaying reconstruction efforts and apply it nationally it will make things much better. The problem is that’s far off in the future and won’t matter in time for November.
Overall, I think policy success has little relationship to short-term electoral success and virtually no relationship to long-term electoral success. If anything, passing legislation tends to be bad electorally because it angers people and they tend to be people who are very politically engaged. Just look at what happens whenever someone touches healthcare. To be sure, there are exceptions. Rescuing the auto industry helped Obama in Ohio and Michigan, but that was a very specific and one-time thing.
Biden has signed a ton of legislation, but not many people know about it. That’s very normal. Very few people follow politics closely. Legislation’s importance often only becomes apparent when someone is trying to take it away, such as the backlash to Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2017. I wish it wasn’t so, but hardly anyone votes to say, “Thank you for getting things done.”
To beat Trump again, Biden shouldn’t be entirely negative, but that’s what I think he should primarily do. Right now, many voters have a selective memory of Trump’s presidency. It’s as if he wasn’t president in 2020. Many voters are holding Trump harmless for everything that went wrong that year because of the pandemic. It will be Biden’s job to change that.
It will also be Biden’s job to let voters know what Trump wants to do regarding inflation. Trump’s biggest plan is to make permanent or extend the tax cuts he signed in 2017. If that happens without any spending cuts, it will be inflationary and will mean higher prices and interest rates. If he does offset it, it will mean massive cuts to the ACA and Medicaid and millions losing their insurance. Either way, it’s going to be bad and people won’t like it.
Of course, there is also abortion. I wrote recently about the executive actions Trump could take against it and I’m sure Biden will pound on that relentlessly. Abortion was always going to be a big issue nationally and in Arizona, a key swing state, but after what happened there on Tuesday the stakes got way higher. The reaction from Trump and other Republicans tells you all you need to know about who has the advantage.
While Biden has a tough task of trying to run for reelection when everyone thinks things nationally are awful, he does have a few tricks up his sleeve. Namely, his opponent is toxic and will probably look even worse by November. He also gets to run on abortion, which should take care of any low enthusiasm for him among Democrats and should give him a big edge with suburban women, a key constituency. Like Biden, there once was an incumbent president who was written off by almost everyone and his defeat was taken as a given. His name was Harry Truman.
[i] My own rule of thumb is the more confident someone is that they can predict the future, the less confident you should be in them, especially when they are using statistical models.
[ii] How do I know nobody cares about those things? You don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask Senators Herschel Walker, Don Bolduc, Adam Laxalt, Mehmet Oz and Blake Masters. Or you can ask Governors Tudor Dixon, Doug Mastriano, Kari Lake, Daniel Cameron, Tim Michels, Scott Jensen and Derek Schmidt. Or you can ask the organizers of the successful effort to pass an anti-abortion amendment in Kansas. Or you can ask the organizers of the successful efforts to defeat pro-choice amendments in Michigan and Ohio. Or you can ask the Republican presidential nominee Ron DeSantis.