Ease Has Demoralized Us

 Future historians will be hard-pressed to explain why the United States—at the very moment it was at the pinnacle of its global power—decided to blow up its own economy and take the rest of the world down with it. Why—when we were the world's only advanced economy to emerge more-or-less unscathed from the pandemic; why—when we were the most prosperous nation in the world, and had just managed to pull off a soft landing from the post-pandemic inflation without losing employment; why—with all these successes and the future looking bright—did we choose that moment to torpedo our own alliance system and sabotage our own economy by antagonizing our closest friends and trading partners? 

The true answer may come down to the quirks of one man—Trump—and his outdated 1990s obsession with NAFTA and his creepy preference for our nation's authoritarian adversaries (including China and Russia) over our friends and treaty allies. But let's suppose for an instant that there is some deeper sociological explanation that transcends the idiosyncrasies of one elected leader. Let's suppose, on some level, the American people wanted this. Why? Why destroy a global alliance system and economic order that overwhelmingly benefits our own nation and has secured to it an enviable position of prosperity and global leadership. Why are we doing this to ourselves? 

In some ways, the perversity of the choice may be its own explanation. In other words, it may be the very fact that the United States has enjoyed so much comparative advantage around the world for so long that we now take that position for granted. "Ease has demoralized us," as Edna St. Vincent Millay once wrote in a poem. "[I]t is a bit like the rising of the sun/ For our country to prosper; who can prevail against us?" she went on—satirizing the complacency that has long dominated our national ethos—leaving us exposed, she argued, to forces gradually hollowing us out from within. As Daniel Bell wrote in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, echoing Irving Kristol: we are "unprepared for calamity." 

Bell's 1976 book—which I read for the first time this weekend—turns out to be very timely. In its account of the sources of the malaise and instability of the 1970s, it proves to be a kind of distant mirror to our own time. He speaks of a "widespread questioning of the legitimacy of institutions," which he traces in part at least to the sense of precariousness introduced by a decade of rampant inflation: 

"Individuals cannot stand too much uncertainty in their lives," he writes, "and the direst measures of uncertainty are the rapid and fluctuating loss in value of the money people use for exchange (the aggravating discrepancies between income and what one has to buy, the erosion of the wealth one has painfully accumulated) and fluctuating unemployment. It is in these circumstances that the traditional institutions and democratic procedures of a society crack, and the irrational, emotional angers and the desire for a political savior come to flood tide." 

Sound familiar? 

But then again, the inflation of 2022 was remarkably transient and small compared to the entrenched double-digit inflation of the 1970s. While both may have introduced a feeling of precariousness—we still don't know why people reacted so much more strongly and perversely to the recent inflation than they did to that of the '70s. After all, the much greater hardships and sources of instability that people faced in this country fifty years ago did not give rise to a fascist takeover of our institutions (George Wallace, notably, lost the elections in which he ran). Whereas today, we seem to be installing an honest-to-goodness autocrat. So something more than fleeting inflation is needed to explain our predicament. 

Bell provides a potential answer to this riddle as well. It is the one we have already mentioned: Ease has demoralized us. We have gotten too used to having everything our own way, so we cannot actually fathom what it would mean to face the loss of our democratic institutions and foreign alliances. We no longer bother to protect these public goods because we have no experience of what it was like to live without them. We have become complacent. As Bell argues: a capitalist system gives rise to a perilous escalation in a sense of entitlement. We believe everything should be easy for us, and we are utterly unwilling to accept the kinds of compromises that life demands. We are, again, unprepared for calamity. 

This insight of Bell's—the cultural contradiction of capitalism; the fact that capitalism gives rise to expectations for hedonistic enjoyment that are incompatible with the maintenance of capitalist prosperity itself—helps us understand one of the deepest mysteries of America's current public behavior. After all, when faced with the widespread discontent and rage that people seem to feel against our current institutions, I always have to wonder: what exactly is their standard of comparison? It can't be the past, because the U.S. is more prosperous now than it ever was before. It can't be other places in the world either, since we have been doing better than every other advanced economy, post-pandemic. 

It has to be, then, that people are comparing our present against some imagined future—some expectations for a utopia of ease and hedonistic enjoyment that has never actually existed anywhere in the world. They are comparing their lot not against what it was, or what it is in other lands, but what they thought it would be. As Bell writes: "When expectations of change rise rapidly, the pressure of hope will inevitably outstrip reality. Just as inevitably, there will be a disjunction between objective change and the subjective assessment of change." This gives rise, in his phrase, to a "revolution of rising entitlements" (his preferred variation on the concept of the "revolution of rising expectations"). 

Why do we assume that the universe owes us endless growth and ever more leisure and prosperity than any of our ancestors ever enjoyed? The answer can only be because our society has actually delivered that, up to this point. With a few hiccups along the way, the U.S. economy has provided a higher standard of living and more prosperity to every generation that entered the workforce. So, people expect it to continue. Ease has demoralized us. It is something like the rising of the sun, for our country to prosper. Of course, we think, this will continue indefinitely. And if it doesn't—it must be because our institutions manifestly failed us. 

But perhaps, in all this rage against our institutions, we are really just raging against the human condition. Perhaps we are raging against the fact that the universe never actually promised us endless growth and universal leisure—and the fact that U.S. history has given us so much of both growth and leisure, so far, is the exception rather than the rule of human life. Perhaps we are raging against the fact that there was no necessary reason for the universe to keep serving up this growth indefinitely. Perhaps we are raging against the fact that, to quote the pessimistic wisdom of Giacomo Leopardi:"Nature in her actions is concerned/ with something else besides our pain or joy." (Galassi trans.) 

Perhaps, in our "revolution of rising entitlements," in our raging against the defeat of our own unrealistic expectations, we are really in the position of the man screaming to the universe—in Stephen Crane's poem—"Sir, I exist!" To which the universe replies—as it will to us all—"The fact has not created in me/ A sense of obligation."