A New Lost Generation in the Age of Trump?
The pandemic changed everything and we are yet to recover from it
Last week I taught William Carlos Williams’ poem “To Elsie” in which he decries the fact that in the modern world he saw “No one/to witness/and adjust, no one to drive the car,” leaving us to the whims of “rich young men with fine eyes” who act “as if the earth under our feet/were/an excrement of some sky/and we degraded prisoners/destined/to hunger until we eat filth.” Reading Williams’ poem, written in the 1920s, to my students was eerily prescient, and I could see several of them nodding as if it was a contemporary work savaging the hateful zeitgeist of our era, fascist techno nerds and all.
Everywhere, every day, sometimes hourly there is yet another assault on the ties that bind us and make our social life together more human and sometimes, even beautiful. Whether it’s recklessly abusing the powerless, tearing up the social contract, or devastating what’s left of our pristine forests and other wild spaces, it feels as if we have been thrust into a world where the last vestige of the graceful, kind, or sacred has been defiled, as if the earth was indeed the excrement of some sky.
In the months since the election of Donald Trump I’ve written several columns outlining the ways we got here, from the Democrats abandoning the working class for neoliberalism to the role of rightwing think tanks, climate denialism, and racially charged backlash populism in defining the nature of the contemporary American right. I’ve also written about the disruptive nature of technology and the decline of community and the accompanying loss of compassion that has gone along with the hollowing out of our social institutions. All these things have played a part in crafting the societal catastrophe we occupy.
But beyond all these social and political factors, there is also another elephant in the room that interestingly connects our times to the period when William Carlos Williams penned “To Elsie”—the pandemic. Just as Williams captured the sense of meaninglessness, menace, and malaise of his moment in the wake of the Spanish flu pandemic, David Wallace-Wells argues in a provocative New York Times feature on “How Covid Remade America” that we are right to be feeling that everything has changed largely for the worse because it has:
Five years after the pandemic began, Donald Trump is president again, but he’s presiding over a very different country now. America is a harsher place, more self-interested and nakedly transactional. We barely trust one another and are less sure that we owe our fellow Americans anything — let alone the rest of the world. The ascendant right is junking our institutions, and liberals have grown skeptical of them, too, though we can’t agree about how exactly they failed us. A growing health libertarianism insists on bodily autonomy, out of anger about pandemic mitigation and faith that personal behavior can ward off infection and death. And the greatest social and technological experiment of our time, artificial intelligence, promises a kind of exit from the realm of human flesh and microbes into one built by code.
We tell ourselves we’ve moved on and hardly talk about the disease or all the people who died or the way the trauma and tumult have transformed us. But Covid changed everything around us.
Wallace-Wells goes on to make the case that the pandemic turned us into alienated, isolated, hyper individualists, driven by fear and then resentment to a new social Darwinism and broken our faith in public health along with everything else. He also makes the case that it paved the way for RFK Jr. and MAHA (“Make America Healthy Again”), gave new life to a retrograde Christianity, encouraged and then demonized protest, shattered our cities, disordered society, and killed the left’s dream of political transformation by diminishing our expectations. It also helped defeat Trump after his first term; then it doomed Biden.
If that wasn’t enough, Wallace-Wells’ analysis suggests that the pandemic might also have pointed to a post-Trump Democratic agenda of “engineered abundance,” changed the geography of work forever, shackled us with debt, encouraged the “casino economy,” fostered growth while untethering happiness from the G.D.P., and redrew our border politics.
Indeed, the combination of all these factors destabilized and undermined politics globally, made the world more mercenary, and reshaped the rightwing echo chamber while pushing billionaires to Trump, reviving racism and sexism, scarring children, and making us sicker. But perhaps the “biggest shock was realizing that we still live in history—and at the mercy of biology.” All this has left us, Wallace-Wells observes, less hopeful and buoyant but more “abrasive and rapacious” and “shaped by a barely suppressed rage” as we struggle to come to terms with “all we have lost.”
While there is much merit to Wallace-Wells’ thoroughgoing attempt to come to terms with the totality of our current social and political ills and situate them historically in the wake of the pandemic, one might also look to the even broader context of the last several decades when, as Noam Chomsky has argued, the radical dislocations that accompanied neoliberalism have led to what he labels a “generalized rage” on the part of the broad, mostly white working class, built on a long history of both economic disempowerment and racial anxiety.
We are more skeptical of one another, more hostile, hyperindividualistic, and full of a deep unease. It appears, as Wallace-Wells suggests, that we have not yet come to terms with the ocean of loss we have been through alone and together. And, as any mental health professional worth their salt will tell you, the flip side of grief is rage, generalized or misdirected. It seems too easy to suggest that what is needed is a politics of healing and reconnection with each other, but if we can’t even begin to imagine what that would look like, the road we are on may be darker and more descending than a lot of folks in the Democratic Party seem to think it is.
Some may want to “play possum,” as James Carville advises, but a deeper look at our situation suggests that the world might be even more angry once we wake up unless somebody can find a way to imagine a future that doesn’t belong to affectless billionaires and their resentful army of the bewildered.
No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car.
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