At various points in my life, I’ve been very pessimistic about a variety of things. In 2008, it was monetary policy. Today, it’s fiscal policy and authoritarian nationalism. At the same time, I’ve never been so pessimistic that I started planning a move to Canada or New Zealand. The US remains a pretty great place to live.
Janan Ganesh has a piece in the FT that seems to criticize both the left and the right for excessive pessimism:
The 1930s are an almost useless guide to what is happening now. The strongmen back then came out of an era of scarcely precedented chaos: the great war, hyperinflation, political gangs fighting for control of the streets. Today’s demagogues emerged in a period of sustained peace and affluence. It was more or less the richest nation on Earth that elected Donald Trump in 2016, after decades of falling violent crime, and more than 40 years since its last conscript war. The Britain that voted to leave the European project had far more industrial peace and international standing than the one that first joined. As for Germany, the far right’s voting base maps almost perfectly on to the old East, which is unrecognisably richer and freer than it was at reunification.
These aren’t just different stories, then, but almost opposing ones. The lesson of the 1930s is that people who suffer — economic pain, physical fear, national territorial loss — are liable to turn to extremists. The lesson of today is that not suffering can induce them to do the same thing. After too long a period of calm, boredom sets in. The temptation to take risks with one’s vote starts to grow. Stability destabilises. The 1930s is simple to understand, as it conforms to common sense: trauma leads to anger. The real intellectual challenge is to absorb the theme of our own time, which is the perverse consequences of prolonged success.
The left wrongly thinks this is the 1930s again, with Hitler just around the corner. The right thinks this is the 1930s again, and we need a strong leader to fix the disastrous state of our society. This is from Trump’s 2017 inauguration speech:
This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
Eight years later, things had gotten even worse:
For many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair.
It’s almost like the right pretends to believe it’s 1933 all over again, with 25% unemployment, and the left pretends to believe it’s 1933 again, with the fascists taking over.
A top Trump official named Michael Anton wrote a famous essay that likened America’s situation to the ill-fated Flight 93 on 9/11. To me, our country seems more like an ordinary United Airlines flight to Chicago, full of annoyances but still a pretty amazing technological feat.
Francis Fukuyama’s book entitled The End of History has been widely criticized, mostly by people who never read it. Here’s what he actually said would happen after the end of history:
Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, they then will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.
Amazing. The best description of the world of 2025 was written in 1989. It’s almost as if the internet was invented to make Fukuyama’s prophecy come true.
I am also reminded of this famous comment by Karl Marx:
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Unfortunately, excessive pessimism has consequences. The pessimist fails to realize just how many problems are faced by even the most successful societies. People start to think: “Things are so bad that we need to shake things up. What do we have to lose?”
What do we have to lose? Let’s think about that phrase. Suppose we were to rank all of the world’s societies from the most to the least successful. Obviously, this list would be somewhat subjective, but I think it’s fair to say that most people would put places like Switzerland and Norway near the top, and places like North Korea, Haiti and Somalia near the bottom. Think of a scale of 1 to 100, with the most successful societies at the top. Where does the US fall on that list? Are we closer to Switzerland and Norway, or are we closer to North Korea and Haiti?
If we decide that things in America are so bad that we need to radically “shake things up”, then is it more likely that we move much higher on the list or much lower?
Imagine a car with a few small mechanical problems. If you pick up the car with a giant robot arm, and shake it wildly up and down, is it more likely that the shaking causes the broken components to fall into their correct position, or is it more likely that the car is even further damaged?
Some studies suggest that happiness is positively correlated with wealth. One possibility is that “money buys happiness”. Another possibility is that depressed people make bad decisions and make themselves worse off.
READER COMMENTS
nobody.really
May 27 2025 at 11:59pm
“Is it unreasonable, then, to expect that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs. Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm, yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.”
Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Address (January 27, 1838)
Scott Sumner
May 28 2025 at 1:54am
Thanks. Great quotation.
Mark Brophy
May 28 2025 at 2:08am
The President is too powerful so let’s be more like Switzerland. Let’s establish a Federal Council of 7 people with a President who serves only one year and whose only job is to run the meetings of the Federal Council.
Mactoul
May 28 2025 at 6:30am
Trump was elected in 2016 on immigration. Not due to any sort of boredom with success or affluence. Naturally Janan Ganesh would not like to stress this fact. If one reads the right-wing it is this fact–the unrestricted, unrestrained immigration of Third World into the First World that promises to overturn the demographics of the First World countries–this fact is prominent in their writings.
This violent change in demographics portends nothing boring in any country’s. Just last week a woman stabbed multiple people in Hamburg railway station. Just a couple of days ago, a car rammed into many people in Liverpool.
Jon Murphy
May 28 2025 at 6:37am
As a factual matter, that is incorrect. Yes, for some voters, immigration (legal and otherwise) was their motivating factor. But, as poll after poll shows, they’re in a minority.
Regardless, the rest of your comment goes to Scott’s point. If what you say is true, their voting motivation is driven by imagined outcomes, not real ones.
Jose Pablo
May 28 2025 at 4:40pm
Just last week a woman stabbed multiple people in Hamburg railway station. Just a couple of days ago, a car rammed into many people in Liverpool.
Funny you bring this up.
Among the G7 countries, the United States has by far the highest homicide rate. And not just marginally higher: 6.9 per 100,000, compared to just 0.87 across the rest of the G7 (UK and Germany included).
To help with the math (since factual accuracy doesn’t seem to be your strong suit), that’s roughly eight times higher.
And to be clear: over 95% of these homicides are committed by American-born individuals. The share attributable to undocumented immigrants is statistically negligible.
But sure, immigration must be the problem.
(Though I’ll admit, I agree in part: the real trouble may have started with the immigration waves between the 17th and 19th centuries.)
In this fact-resistant narrative some cling to, when immigrants aren’t allegedly eating dogs or cats, they’re apparently out murdering innocent, unarmed, law-abiding Americans.
Your comment turns reality into a fiction crafted to serve a tired tribal narrative
Matt Conner
May 28 2025 at 9:43am
All the tropes about easy times aside, perhaps this is just human nature:
“Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.” – Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
JoeF
May 28 2025 at 11:11am
“It’s almost like the right pretends to believe it’s 1933 all over again, with 25% unemployment, and the left pretends to believe it’s 1933 again, with the fascists taking over.”
Or could it just be that if you just read an article in FT inspired by an Anselm Kiefer exhibition you might find yourself interpreting current events through a German nationalism lens for a bit?
I don’t know any Americans, left or right, who (in real life, not online) are as extreme as you have described. I also lived in Oslo for a year. Well-off Norwegians were very interested in moving to the US. I have never met an American who wanted to move to Norway (or Haiti).
Jon Murphy
May 28 2025 at 11:15am
They’re fairly common. Hang out in the comments section here (or any econ blog) and you’ll see them pop up. Oren Cass’s writings are quite common, too. Lutnick often talks as if there are these mass unemployed manufacturing workers who are just waiting to suck up jobs.
Jose Pablo
May 28 2025 at 5:58pm
https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/will-anyone-take-the-factory-jobs-trump-wants-to-bring-back-to-america-f6cd377b?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1
Couple of extracts:
The jobs are tiring, feature hazards not found at desk jobs and are tough to fill. Once workers are recruited, it can be difficult to get them to stay. This is work politicians lionize, but Americans often don’t want.
America has nearly half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Nearly half of manufacturing companies say their biggest challenge is recruiting and retaining workers, according to a survey this year by the National Association of Manufacturers.
But hey, never let the facts get in the way of a good narrative.
john hare
May 28 2025 at 4:56pm
I was a member of a 912 group for a while. There are definitely people that extreme in real life. When it came to any disagreement, several Didn’t Want To Hear It. A guest speaker from the John Birch Society couldn’t get through to many with a message on moderating their stance.
I have been cut off of comments (they hung up) on both right and left wing radio.
Jose Pablo
May 28 2025 at 5:02pm
they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle
But you’d have to be remarkably blind to fool yourself into believing that you do. Even living in the US.
Illness, poverty, war, aging, death … human life is anything but free of struggle. We are, after all, the creation of a god cruel beyond the wildest imagination.
And yet, somehow, we choose to throw ourselves into petty nationalistic disputes, conflicts that are almost laughably irrelevant compared to the true, existential forces that shape our lives.
We are, for instance, capable of fooling ourselves into believing that trade deficits are a struggle worthier to tackle than cancer.
We are driven into these hollow battles by status-seeking, small-minded individuals we call “politicians.”
Jose Pablo
May 28 2025 at 5:09pm
That sounded pretty pessimistic, sorry Scott.
David Seltzer
May 28 2025 at 7:02pm
Scott: Interesting post. Søren Kierkegaard focused on the individual’s experience. One of his primary ideas was the importance of subjective truth. To wit. Individuals are responsible for their choices. Each of us has to confront life’s challenges. How one achieves that requires discipline, skepticism and a strong desire to learn. Personally, I’m cautiously optimistic. Why? I can criticize DJT’s policies, alienate people for those opinions, but don’t fear being hung from a crane for doing so. At least not today.