![]() ![]() Or March 2004, at the dawn of the Iraq War, when a full 71 percent of Americans expressed approval of George W. Just think of October 6, 2001, less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when public trust in government reached its highest level since before the Nixon administration. According to one bipartisan NBC study from early 2023, 71 percent of Americans say we’re on the wrong track as a country-the eighth time in the past nine quarters that this survey percentage has crossed 70 percent, marking the longest period of severe American pessimism since polling began more than 30 years ago.īut why now? America has been through public crises before and emerged with greater levels of trust and hope. This mindset change might seem a long way off. And it can help lead to the kind of social culture necessary for any kind of change to occur -that is, an environment where individuals have both the opportunity and the desire to organize with members of their community in pursuit of collective gain. But it can provide a compelling collective vision, and hope, for the best of societal ideas. Such a framework doesn’t lead automatically to social change, of course. If the technological and economic improvements that have marked so much of modern life have allowed us to question-and even become angry about-areas where we perceive work yet to be done, then we’re simply participating in a long-standing American tradition of working toward perfection in an imperfect world. It’s possible to treat our collective pessimism not as a function of “the worst possible timeline,” to quote an ubiquitous meme derived from the TV show Community, but rather a natural corollary of our distinctly American optimism: our tradition of idealistic cultural narratives that things ought to be better than they are. To break out of the spiral of doom requires not just practical social change, but also a collective reimagining of what the world can be. After all, how could any reasonable person look at economic strife and racial injustice and mass death and not feel despair?īut part of cultural pessimism’s pervasiveness comes from the fact that it’s self-reinforcing, as a highly marketable narrative of despair that sells resigned inaction (to say nothing of scented candles, bath bubbles, and other products meant to soothe). At times, it can even feel socially expected. The posture of broad doomerism can feel like a natural response to the major events of the 21st century so far. Read: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid “Cultural pessimism is more widespread and much more public than it used to be,” Rhys Williams, a Loyola University Chicago sociologist who specializes in the relationship between politics, religion, and social movements in America, told me. This dismal assessment of America’s prospects feels inescapable in some circles right now. At least, if artificial intelligence doesn’t get there first. Fewer and fewer people are choosing to have children, citing not only economic concerns but moral ones: How could anyone bring an infant into a world as benighted by cruelty and injustice as this one? The thinking goes like this: The inevitable march of climate change will probably wipe out humanity, anyway. Meanwhile, preventable “deaths of despair”-including suicide and deaths related to substance abuse-are on the rise. A pandemic has killed more than 1 million Americans. Marginalized groups continue to fight against centuries of systemic injustices. Our economic and social systems make the rich richer and keep the poor poorer. The government is paralyzed by toxic polarization. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. ![]()
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