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View Full Version : tPF ‘Everything is amazing right now and nobody is happy’



Chris
07-09-2016, 11:07 AM
I see these as related, two aspects of the same problem. Let's begin with a rant...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8LaT5Iiwo4

That's taken from Mark Perry's ‘Everything is amazing right now and nobody is happy’ or ‘Americans forget how good they have it’ (http://www.aei.org/publication/everything-is-amazing-right-now-and-nobody-is-happy-or-americans-forget-how-good-they-have-it/):


...That’s [referring to Louis CK’s rant] what psychologists call habituation, as we learn from a recent related Reason article by A. Barton Hinkle (“Americans Forget How Good They Have It“), which reminded me of the Louis CK video above and inspired this post. Here’s an excerpt from Hinkle’s article:



...This is what psychologists call habituation—the tendency to get used to things, no matter how good or bad. You buy a new car and for the first few weeks you absolutely love it, but then one day you find the shine of it has worn off and it’s just a car.

A few decades ago rich people could buy encyclopedia sets on the installment plan. Now most of us walk around with a little box in our pocket that gives us instant access to nearly the entirety of human knowledge. And it’s like that in field after field.

Robert J. Samuelson recently noted that the middle class is shrinking—not because people are getting poorer, but because they are getting richer. The share of the populace that qualifies as upper middle class has more than doubled since 1979. But you listen to Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump and you’d think America has been sliding downhill since the Johnson administration. Don’t believe it for a second.


Another explanation is found in Yuval Levin's "The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism", here reviewed by John Waters in America's Age of Individualism (http://www.realclearbooks.com/articles/2016/07/07/americas_age_of_individualism_.html):


Yes, the book begins by considering the sources of the extraordinary frustration and paralysis that have overcome our politics in this century. It argues that American political life today is intensely nostalgic—that both parties suggest that America not so long ago had the recipe for success but gave it up, and that we could now simply recapture it and replay our past glory.

Republicans and Democrats do this in different ways of course. The Left wishes it was always 1965 and the model of the Great Society welfare state could answer our every concern, the Right wishes it was always 1981 and a repetition of the Reagan Revolution could be the cure for what ails us, and they have both decided to just pretend that things are as they wish they were. And so again and again they have asked voters to treat elections as choices between re-running the 60s and the 80s. That makes for political debates that are disconnected from reality—they ignore how our country has changed over the decades, and so they ignore both our strengths and our weaknesses and they don’t speak to the problems people actually confront.

Those problems are a function of how American life has been transformed. Over the past half century, we have gone from a society dominated by a few large institutions—big government, big business, big labor, all working together to manage the country—to a society with many more but smaller players and niches and grooves. In economics and in the culture, we now have vastly more options and choices, but less predictability and security. More diversity but less unity. More dynamism but less stability. Everything can be personalized, but we have less in common. We’ve been fractured and fragmented. And the real question our politics needs to confront is how to use the strengths of this fragmented and fractured but diverse and dynamic society to address its weaknesses. The failure to see that, and do that, is certainly bipartisan.