Frank Bruni (this and everything below from “Lost in
America,” The New York Times, August
25, 2014): More and more I’m convinced
that America right now isn’t a country dealing with a mere dip in its mood and
might. It’s a country surrendering to a new identity and era, in which optimism
is quaint and the frontier anything but endless.
James B.
Huntington: Yes, the country is in a new
era. It is called Work’s New Age, in
which the number of jobs will never again match the number of people who want
them. Actually it’s been going on for a
long time, but it’s become obvious only since the Great Recession. Being unsure you, your loved ones, your
friends, and even your countrymen can’t always support themselves, something
which Americans knew and counted on since before George Washington was born,
makes for persistent pessimism.
FB: There’s a feeling
of helplessness that makes the political horizon, including the coming midterm
elections, especially unpredictable. Conventional wisdom has seldom been so
useless, because pessimism in this country isn’t usually this durable or
profound.
JH: Helpless is the word, especially when there
isn’t a presidential candidate, or even a House or Senate one I am aware of,
who is clearly and forthrightly addressing the jobs crisis. A few passable employment reports are all it
takes, it seems, to put any hints of this great transition on the major media’s
back burner.
FB: Americans are
apprehensive about where they are and even more so about where they’re going.
But they don’t see anything or anyone to lead them into the light. They’re sour
on the president, on the Democratic Party and on Republicans most of all.
They’re hungry for hope but don’t spot it on the menu. Where that tension
leaves us is anybody’s guess.
JH: We have a president who sometimes seems to be
spread too thin, with too many top priorities, and sometimes seems to be disengaging
from everything. The Democrats have been
going for the wrong issues: gun control,
climate change, massive and broad-brush immigration reform, and insinuations
that a suburban cop who shot someone he claims was threatening his life embodies
the collective thoughts of America’s 280 million non-blacks. Republicans are continuing to act like the
child on the toilet who refuses to do anything, and are deluding themselves
that they are getting more and more mass appeal, when Sportsbook.com, which
puts their money where their pixels are, says their chances of winning the
presidency in 2016 are 17 to 10 against.
Congress’s approval rating might be lower than Hitler’s. What on earth is to like?
FB: Much of this was
chillingly captured by a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from early August
that got lost somewhat amid the recent deluge of awful news but deserved closer
attention. It included the jolting
finding that 76 percent of Americans ages 18 and older weren’t confident that
their children’s generation would fare better than their own. That’s a blunt
repudiation of the very idea of America, of what the “land of opportunity” is
supposed to be about. For most voters, the national narrative is no longer
plausible.
JH: That’s exactly what we’re going through
now. Billy Joel wrote in 1981 that
people expected to do as well as their fathers, when before it had always been
“better.” Since then that has got worse,
backed up by most people’s lives. When I
get a Milwaukee airport porter telling me in the 2000s, before the recession,
that the 1970s were “the good times,” that means we aren’t moving forward, even
if our phones are slicker and our computers faster. I wasn’t kidding when I put in large letters
on the back of Work’s New Age, three
years ago, that “the core American idea has been destroyed.”
FB: The poll also
showed that 71 percent thought that the country was on the wrong track. While
that represents a spike, it also affirms a negative mind-set that’s been fixed
for a scarily long time. As the Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik has repeatedly
noted, more Americans have been saying “wrong track” than “right track” for at
least a decade now, and something’s got to give.
JH: Nobody can get to 71% without large numbers
of both conservatives and liberals, so it’s safe to say that neither side is
happy. But what has to “give,” and when,
and why? The problem we have is that the
status quo always seems to roll on.
FB: But to what or
whom can Americans turn? In the most
recent of Sosnik’s periodic assessments of the electorate, published in Politico
last month, he wrote: “It is difficult to overstate the depth of the anger and
alienation that a majority of all Americans feel toward the federal
government.” He cited a Gallup poll in late June that showed that Americans’
faith in each of the three branches had dropped to what he called “near record
lows,” with only 30 percent expressing confidence in the Supreme Court, 29
percent in the presidency and 7 percent in Congress.
JH: Again, these are bipartisan numbers. The government is managing to be both too
intrusive and too inactive. If those
70%, 71%, and 93% (!) could agree on anything else, there’d be a revolution,
but they don’t, so there won’t be.
FB: The intensity of
Americans’ disgust with Congress came through in another recent poll, by ABC
News and The Washington Post. Typically, Americans lambaste the institution as
a whole but make an exception for the politician representing their district.
But in this poll, for the first time in the 25 years that ABC and The Post had
been asking the question, a majority of respondents — 51 percent — said that
they disapproved even of the job that their own House member was doing.
JH: One reason is that representatives aren’t so
bad with local issues, but stink on ice with the national ones. So we get the local parks, land use laws, and
balanced county budgets, while we can’t find jobs, are held back by byzantine
business regulations, and bumble around in our relations with other
countries. Ted Kennedy, whatever you
think of his politics, was about the best senator ever for his constituents –
if you had a problem with government, on anything from poor trash collection to
getting already-paid bills from the IRS, you called his office and they fixed
it. If it isn’t quite true that all
politics is local, as Tip O’Neill used to say, Americans sure seem to believe
it – and vote that way.
FB: So we can expect
to see a huge turnover in Congress after the midterms, right? That’s a rhetorical question, and a joke.
Congress wasn’t in any great favor in 2012, and 90 percent of the House members
and 91 percent of the senators who sought re-election won it. The tyranny of
money, patronage, name recognition and gerrymandering in American politics
guaranteed as much. Small wonder that 79 percent of Americans indicated
dissatisfaction with the system in the Journal/NBC poll.
JH: And those numbers are actually down!
Once was 98%, for House incumbents anyway. It’s no surprise, then, that the URL www.throwthebumsout.org is still unassigned.
FB: Conventional
wisdom says that President Obama’s anemic approval ratings will haunt
Democrats. But it doesn’t take into account how effectively some Republicans
continue to sully their party’s image. It doesn’t factor in how broadly
Americans’ disapproval spreads out.
JH: We still have the two-party system, where if
we don’t like the show on one TV channel we just switch to the other. It’s not enough to say the Democrats will
lose since they have done so badly, without considering what’s on the other
station.
FB: Conventional
wisdom says that better unemployment and job-creation numbers could save
Democrats. But many Americans aren’t feeling those improvements. When asked in
the Journal/NBC poll if the country was in a recession — which it’s not — 49
percent of respondents said yes, while 46 percent said no.
JH: Absolutely correct. We have not been in a recession since
2009. It feels so much like one because
of the permanent jobs crisis, and the 20 million more American jobs which could
be quickly absorbed. The worse news is
that when we get a real recession, we will look back on 2010 to 2014 as good
times – which they, in a relative sense, truly are.
FB: The new jobs
don’t feel as sturdy as the old ones. It takes more hours to make the same
money or support the same lifestyle. Students amass debt. Upward mobility
increasingly seems a mirage, a myth.
JH: We don’t need to “feel” that the positions
now are weaker – the data is there.
One-third of new jobs since 2009 have been with temporary help
agencies. American student debt is now
over $1 trillion and blew by total credit card debt last year.
FB: “People are mad
at Democrats,” John Hickenlooper, the Democratic governor of Colorado, told me.
“But they’re certainly not happy with Republicans. They’re mad at everything.”
That’s coming from the leader of a state whose unemployment rate is down to 5.3
percent.
JH: That’s just the point, and Colorado certainly
has both, along with a shortage of about 200,000 jobs, lowish official
unemployment or not.
FB: And it suggests
that this isn’t just about the economy. It’s about fear. It’s about impotence.
We can’t calm the world in the way we’d like to, can’t find common ground and
peace at home, can’t pass needed laws, can’t build necessary infrastructure,
can’t, can’t, can’t.
JH: Not many public issues can evoke fear and
impotence as much as being unsure if you can get another job if you lose your
current one. And as long as Democrats
continue to pursue their most partisan issues, and Republicans refuse to go
along with even inherently conservative Democratic proposals, large numbers of
people will maintain those feelings.
FB: In the
Journal/NBC poll, 60 percent of Americans said that we were a nation in
decline. How sad. Sadder still was this: Nowhere in the survey was there any
indication that they saw a method or a messenger poised to arrest it.
JH: That’s what politicians are supposed to do. Authors, bloggers, and columnists can yack
forever about what should be done, so there is no shortage of ideas, even
neutral or centrist ones, but that is not enough. It’s too optimistic to ask for much along
those lines from the fall elections, but it’s not excessive to expect at least
one 2016 major-party presidential candidate to advocate some real bipartisan
action and changes, by throwing off extreme beholdenness to their political
base. In many ways, such as
technological progress, life expectancy, and, yes, personal safety, America is
not declining at all, just governmentally tied up in knots. In the meantime, the jobs crisis, as long as
it is not addressed in ways both parties can live with, will assure plenty of long-lasting
malaise.