Nov. 22, 2021
By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
On Friday morning, after a night of insomnia fueled by worries about raising children in a collapsing society, I opened my eyes, started reading about efforts by Wisconsin Republicans to seize control of the state’s elections, then paused to let my tachycardiac heartbeat subside. Marinating in the news is part of my job, but doing so lately is a source of full-body horror. If this were simply my problem, I’d write about it in a journal instead of in The New York Times. But political despair is an issue for the entire Democratic Party.
It’s predictable that, with Donald Trump out of the White House, Democrats would pull back from constant, frenetic political engagement. But there’s a withdrawal happening right now — from news consumption, activism and, in some places, voting — that seems less a product of relief than of avoidance. Part of this is simply burnout and lingering trauma from Covid. But I suspect that part of it is about growing hopelessness born of a sense that dislodging Trump has bought American democracy only a brief reprieve.
One redeeming feature of Trump’s presidency, in retrospect, was that it was possible to look forward to the date when Americans could finish it. Covid, too, once seemed like something we’d be able to largely put behind us when we got vaccinated. Sure, Trumpism, like the virus, would linger, but it was easy to imagine a much better world after the election, the inauguration and the wide availability of shots.
Now we’re past all that, and American life is still comprehensively awful. Dystopia no longer has an expiration date.
My friend Chris Hayes, the MSNBC host, uses the phrase “the bad feeling” to describe certain kinds of stories about America’s democratic unraveling. “The bad feeling is that pit of the stomach feeling that we’re not OK, and it’s not clear we’re going to be OK,” he told me.
The problem isn’t just that polls show that, at least right now, voters want to hand over Congress to a party that largely treats the Jan. 6 insurrectionists as heroes. That’s upsetting, but it’s also fairly normal given the tendency of American voters to react against the party in power, and in a democratic system Republicans should prevail when they have public sentiment behind them.
What’s terrifying is that even if Democrats win back public confidence, they can win more votes than Republicans and still lose. Gerrymandering alone is enough to tip the balance in the House. North Carolina, a state Joe Biden lost by 1.3 percentage points, just passed a redistricting map that would create 10 Republican seats, three Democratic ones and one competitive one. “Democrats would have to win North Carolina by 11.4 points just to win half its congressional seats,” FiveThirtyEight reported.
There are already lawsuits against the map, but the Supreme Court — which is controlled by conservatives even though Democrats won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight elections — gutted constitutional limitations on gerrymandering in 2019.
Things are, if anything, even worse in the Senate, where growing geographic polarization threatens to give Republicans a near lock on the chamber. As my colleague Ezra Klein wrote last month, the Democratic data guru David Shor predicts that if Democrats win 51 percent of the two-party vote in 2024, they will lose seven seats compared to where we are now.
Meanwhile, Republicans are purging local officials who protected the integrity of the 2020 election, replacing them with apparatchiks. It will be hard for Republicans to steal the 2024 election outright, since they don’t control the current administration, but they can throw it into the sort of chaos that will cause widespread civil unrest. And if they win, it’s hard to imagine them ever consenting to the peaceful transfer of power again. As Hayes said, there’s an inexorability about what’s coming that is “very hard to watch.”
Already, the Republican Party winks at the violent intimidation of its political enemies. During the presidential campaign, a right-wing caravan tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road, and Senator Marco Rubio cheered them on. School board members and public health offices have sought help from the Justice Department to deal with a barrage of threats and harassment. Three congressional Republicans have said they want to give an internship to the teenage vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse. One of those Republicans, Representative Paul Gosar, earlier tweeted an animated video of himself killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the overwhelming majority of his caucus stood by him.
I look at the future and I see rule without recourse by people who either approve of terrorizing liberals or welcome those who do. Such an outcome isn’t inevitable; unforeseen events can reshape political coalitions. Something could happen to forestall the catastrophe bearing down on us. How much comfort you take from this depends on your disposition.
Given the bleak trajectory of American politics, I worry about progressives retreating into private life to preserve their sanity, a retreat that will only hasten democracy’s decay. In order to get people to throw themselves into the fight to save this broken country, we need leaders who can convince them that they haven’t already lost.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/opin ... cracy.html
The Problem of Political Despair
Re: The Problem of Political Despair
Jennifer Rubin, WAPO, 1/4
If politics is downstream from culture, then culture is downstream from character. And right now, we have a character crisis in America. It’s often characterized as a civility crisis.
“In a study of 1,000 American adults during the pandemic, 48 percent of adults and 55 percent of workers said that in November 2020, they had expected that civility in America would improve after the election,” the New York Times reports. “By August, the expectations of improvement had fallen to 30 percent overall and 37 percent among workers. Overall, only 39 percent of the respondents said they believed that America’s tone was civil.” And no surprise: “The study also found that people who didn’t have to work with customers were happier than those who did.”
It would be convenient to blame covid-19 or Donald Trump, but the problem started long before either became a national blight. Back in 2013, studies were warning that “civility in America continues to disintegrate and rude behavior is becoming the ‘new normal.’" The report “Civility in America 2019” found that 93 percent of Americans identified incivility as a problem; 68 percent considered it a “major” one, and 74 percent thought it was getting worse.
“Incivility,” which one associates with minor social infractions or foul language, doesn’t really capture the enormity of the crisis, though. Airline passengers assaulting flight attendants, parents threatening school board members, customers haranguing store clerks or fellow shoppers — these have all become common occurrences. Scholarly studies document increased hostility in the workplace, too.
Author and columnist Tom Nichols has been writing for years about “a long trend of rising narcissism and a sense of entitlement that was enabled by peace, prosperity, and rapidly improving living standards.” We’ve become impatient, selfish, self-absorbed and increasingly violent — all before the pandemic. The coronavirus merely worsened the problem by fueling a surge in mental and stress-related illness.
Our expectations (instant, perfect service, no matter how unreasonable the demand) are out of whack not only with pandemic-stricken America but really any society under the best of conditions. Flights get canceled. Stores run out of merchandise. Obscure items take time to get delivered. Our capacity for inconvenience is as small as our national attention span — and both have been shrunk by social media that prods us to anger. For every Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene banned from Twitter, there’s an army of equally offensive users.
Understandably, parents have been frustrated by school shutdowns. But fury at schools is disproportionate and entirely unfair. Imagine if schools had continued in person pre-vaccine and children had died.
Monday-morning quarterbacking and I-told-you-so invective are practically national pastimes. Solutions to unprecedented and complicated problems are somehow supposed to be self-evident and come without adverse consequences of their own. And sure enough, the media and public will become incensed when political leaders turn out to lack clairvoyance.
Elected officials should set a better of example on the civility, tolerance and decency front. But keep in mind that craven politicians more often than not follow the herd. They race to catch up to the unhinged mob, aping the public’s vulgarity, rudeness and proclivity for violence. (Hence, Ivy League-educated senators sound like angry country bumpkins and campaign ads depicting candidates shooting something become commonplace.)
Blame the decline in religious faith or the proliferation of cringe-worthy entertainment. Blame Mark Zuckerberg. Blame parents for not parenting, teachers for not teaching and ministers for not ministering. But ultimately, adults are responsible for their own conduct. And if we can no longer muster enough self-restraint, empathy, civic-mindedness, self-discipline and rationality to navigate ordinary interactions, responsible self-governance will remain out of reach.
Unless we all shape up, demand better of ourselves and others, and reassert basic social norms, democracy and social cohesion will continue to unravel.
If politics is downstream from culture, then culture is downstream from character. And right now, we have a character crisis in America. It’s often characterized as a civility crisis.
“In a study of 1,000 American adults during the pandemic, 48 percent of adults and 55 percent of workers said that in November 2020, they had expected that civility in America would improve after the election,” the New York Times reports. “By August, the expectations of improvement had fallen to 30 percent overall and 37 percent among workers. Overall, only 39 percent of the respondents said they believed that America’s tone was civil.” And no surprise: “The study also found that people who didn’t have to work with customers were happier than those who did.”
It would be convenient to blame covid-19 or Donald Trump, but the problem started long before either became a national blight. Back in 2013, studies were warning that “civility in America continues to disintegrate and rude behavior is becoming the ‘new normal.’" The report “Civility in America 2019” found that 93 percent of Americans identified incivility as a problem; 68 percent considered it a “major” one, and 74 percent thought it was getting worse.
“Incivility,” which one associates with minor social infractions or foul language, doesn’t really capture the enormity of the crisis, though. Airline passengers assaulting flight attendants, parents threatening school board members, customers haranguing store clerks or fellow shoppers — these have all become common occurrences. Scholarly studies document increased hostility in the workplace, too.
Author and columnist Tom Nichols has been writing for years about “a long trend of rising narcissism and a sense of entitlement that was enabled by peace, prosperity, and rapidly improving living standards.” We’ve become impatient, selfish, self-absorbed and increasingly violent — all before the pandemic. The coronavirus merely worsened the problem by fueling a surge in mental and stress-related illness.
Our expectations (instant, perfect service, no matter how unreasonable the demand) are out of whack not only with pandemic-stricken America but really any society under the best of conditions. Flights get canceled. Stores run out of merchandise. Obscure items take time to get delivered. Our capacity for inconvenience is as small as our national attention span — and both have been shrunk by social media that prods us to anger. For every Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene banned from Twitter, there’s an army of equally offensive users.
Understandably, parents have been frustrated by school shutdowns. But fury at schools is disproportionate and entirely unfair. Imagine if schools had continued in person pre-vaccine and children had died.
Monday-morning quarterbacking and I-told-you-so invective are practically national pastimes. Solutions to unprecedented and complicated problems are somehow supposed to be self-evident and come without adverse consequences of their own. And sure enough, the media and public will become incensed when political leaders turn out to lack clairvoyance.
Elected officials should set a better of example on the civility, tolerance and decency front. But keep in mind that craven politicians more often than not follow the herd. They race to catch up to the unhinged mob, aping the public’s vulgarity, rudeness and proclivity for violence. (Hence, Ivy League-educated senators sound like angry country bumpkins and campaign ads depicting candidates shooting something become commonplace.)
Blame the decline in religious faith or the proliferation of cringe-worthy entertainment. Blame Mark Zuckerberg. Blame parents for not parenting, teachers for not teaching and ministers for not ministering. But ultimately, adults are responsible for their own conduct. And if we can no longer muster enough self-restraint, empathy, civic-mindedness, self-discipline and rationality to navigate ordinary interactions, responsible self-governance will remain out of reach.
Unless we all shape up, demand better of ourselves and others, and reassert basic social norms, democracy and social cohesion will continue to unravel.
Re: The Problem of Political Despair
63M Americans voted for " birther ", "grab 'em by the..." Trump in 2016.
74M Americans voted for " good people on both sides ", " supposing you brought the light inside the body " Trump in 2020.
Seems pretty clear where the crisis is located.
Re: The Problem of Political Despair
Agree. He's just exacerbating a trend.
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