The Culture of Despair
Perhaps what we needed after Trump wasn’t a return to “normal” after all
By Jim Miller
Last week was a grim one amidst many of late. On one of our early morning walks before work, my wife and I ran into a family friend and, after exchanging the usual pleasantries, it only took about a minute to get to what has become the almost ritual headshaking about the state of the world.
“We’re a sick country,” he said, “And I don’t see it getting better anytime soon.” We agreed and ended our chat with the obligatory “hang in there” before he drove off to teach at a local middle school.
And how could one not think that, in the wake of the stunning Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal, as we witnessed yet another horrifying mass shooting at a high school by a 15-year-old boy in Michigan and simultaneously learned that the former President of the United States knowingly attended a debate and multiple campaign events with Covid-19, callously disregarding the well-being of others. That’s a culture of sociopathy. It makes one ponder whether the social fabric of America has frayed beyond repair.
Add to those tales of heedless malice the news that just as the Omicron variant emerged in California, the Republican Party USA was mulling whether to force a government shutdown for the sole purpose of defunding Biden’s vaccine mandates aimed at stopping more needless death. All this while the American Legislative Exchange Council was in town at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, living large and cooking up new ways to turn our schools into political battlegrounds and undermining a wide range of our rights along with the democratic process itself.
Then of course there was the big story at the Supreme Court as we listened to reports of how the Trump-appointed justices were undermining American women’s reproductive rights in real time. If it felt like the Handmaid’s Tale, that’s because it is like the Handmaid’s Tale, starring the new Rightwing Zealots in charge. We are turning back the clock to a time when people like my wife and millions of others like her who have had abortions would be criminals in more than half the country.
It is as bad as it seems.
As Ruth Marcus observed in a fine Washington Post essay on the court, “The Rule of Six: A Newly Radicalized Supreme Court Poised to Reshape the Nation:
And so for those who believe the court has a vital role to play in protecting democracy, promoting civil rights and achieving justice, “the outlook is not good at all,” said Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who served as solicitor general in the Obama administration. “Things may unfold more slowly or less completely than our worst fears. But I think most of our worst fears are going to be realized. It’s just a question of at what pace.”
If that grim diagnosis seems correct, the cure is more elusive. Some treatments, like court-packing, would be worse than the disease. Others, like imposing term limits, are harder to administer and wouldn’t be effective for years. Which means: The court is where it is. The Rule of Six is now in force. Conservatives have time to write their views into the law books, where they will remain for decades to come. The change they choose to enact will be swift or slow; it will be open or stealthy.
But make no mistake: It is coming. The court, and the nation, will be worse off for it.
So, whether it is reproductive rights, marriage equity, voting rights, gun laws, climate policy, or even basic public health protections, the legal apparatus of the United States at the highest level is stacked against progressive change. Indeed, the trajectory is heading backwards fast on multiple levels.
Many pundits of late have opined about the “deep roots of liberal despair” and/or “the problem of political despair” when, as Michelle Goldberg puts it, “American life is still comprehensively awful. Dystopia no longer has an expiration date.”
Goldberg worries that despair will drive good people to turn away from politics entirely and leave the field, surrendering it to the right. But it’s fair to ask if our politics created a culture of despair or if those politics emerged from a solidarity-killing society that has been eroding the ties that bind us for a long, long time.
At a moment when, as our friend put it, “It’s hard to maintain a positive attitude about the future to give the kids hope,” perhaps what is needed is a complete re-evaluation of the culture and a vision that truly addresses what ails us.
Perhaps what we needed after Trump wasn’t a return to “normal” after all, but a realization that normal American life was the problem all along. The next election won’t save us, nor will the tactical shift on the part of the Democratic Party.
We have turned a page to a dark new chapter and only a deep recommitment to building the things that foster real human connections in our society will undo what decades of Social Darwinist economics, relentless alienation, and misdirected rage have wrought. Perhaps we can all start by refusing to normalize the unacceptable.