Divided, Demoralized, and Disoriented.
The bizarre claim that America's best days are ahead of us.
In Ron DeSantis’s pre-failure-to-launch campaign video, the narrator intones, “They call it faith because, in the darkness, you can see a brighter future. The faith that our best days lay ahead of us.” It’s a message we hear from politicians of all political persuasions. They always have some riff on the idea that America may be a rathole now, but if you just them a chance the streets will once again be paved with gold, every pot will hold a chicken, and our children – as they once were in Lake Woebegone – will be above average. Just there, just around the corner, is a city shining on a hill. It’s the promise of renewal. It’s Morning in America, A Town Called Hope, Hope and Change, and Make America Great Again. It’s been the same unfulfilled promise for forty years. Does anybody still believe this shit?
What evidence do we have that America’s best days are ahead of us? What reason do we have for continued faith in the grand American experiment? Why should we trust any politician who looks at our divided and hollowed-out country and says anything other than “We’re fucked”?
Yes, we remain the richest nation on Earth. Yes, we are still an innovative country filled with people of great imagination and derring-do. Yes, we have abundant natural resources. Yes, immigrants still risk their lives to come here for the hope of giving their children better lives. But we’re also divided, demoralized, and disoriented. Life expectancy is falling. Wages are stagnant. Our government is paralytic, our Supreme Court corrupt. There are daily mass shootings and no political will to do anything about them. Suicide rates are up. The Surgeon General calls loneliness in America an “epidemic.” A growing Christian Nationalist movement threatens to overlay their own regressive morality into every public space. Every common good, from public education to the postal system to public libraries, is under attack. Fewer people are getting married. The tax system is weighted towards mega-corporations and the rich, and why wouldn’t it be? We have an oligarchic ruling class that dominates our political system for their own self-interest. At the moment, we’re teetering on a historic default for no reason other than some mean kids are throwing a pissy party. Not to mention the global climate emergency - leadership is absent on that front, too. America feels like a punch-drunk boxer who doesn’t know when to hang up his gloves.
No wonder Trump remains so popular among the disillusioned. “Make America great again” isn’t so much a call to action as an acknowledgment that America, as we currently inhabit it, sucks. As President, his great trick wasn’t doing anything to fix America’s problems. Instead, he focused his attention solely on shitting on the already shit-upon in the hopes that by making their lives worse, he would make the rest of us feel like our lives had improved.
Although the age difference between Trump and Biden is only four years, maybe one of the reasons that Biden looks so blinkered is his Eisenhower-era insistence that everything’s coming up roses. No, Grandpa, it’s not. Our problems are real and so deeply entrenched they might as well be carved into Mt. Rushmore. On the other hand, Trump understands that people no longer trust politicians like Biden who shuffle in front of the microphones and make nicey-nice with the same institutions fucking Lady Liberty in every last raw hole. Trump’s voters love him because the Great Bullshit Artist is the first guy that calls bullshit on the whole rotten thing. Game recognize game.
The left and right flanks of our political parties each understand the monumental mess in which we find ourselves. The Left, at least, is trying to mitigate the damage by proposing policies that might level the playing field a little bit. The Right only wants to carve up the country for parts and blame Dylan Mulvaney for their theft. The problem is half of the country agrees with this approach; they’ll take their meager slice of the pie and call it a win just so long as the people they don’t like are denied any dessert at all. It’s the old Lyndon Johnson quote reborn: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
We’re a nation sitting on hold trying to figure out what button to push because the menu options have recently changed. The problem is, no matter how many buttons we press, it feels like nobody’s there to take the call. The America of our imagination no longer aligns with the America of our reality. Did it ever? Maybe not, but at least we felt as if we were moving, however slowly, towards that elusive perfect union. Not so much anymore. So, yeah, DeSantis’s stupid egomaniacal campaign launch experienced humiliating technical glitches caused by the host company’s equally egomaniacal owner decimating his own infrastructure, almost bringing the whole thing crashing down. Welcome to America, pal.
It very well may be true that our best days are ahead of us. Stranger things have happened. I just can’t think of any.
Perfect, no notes.