After her humiliating loss to Donald Trump in 2016, Hillary Clinton and her team racked their brains for every conceivable reason why the election loss could be the fault of anyone but her and her staff. It was the Russians and their darned Facebook ads, James Comey and his investigations, Wikileaks for releasing her and Podesta’s emails (but never their fault for sending them), or the media for spending too much time on said emails and not enough on Trump’s flaws (as if the media could have possibly been more in the tank for her). But the most toxic subject of her ire has generally been the voters themselves. In one of her most revealing statements, she noted "I won the places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product … I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”
Campaigning in 1936 for re-election, FDR made it a point to note that he welcomed the hatred of business and finance monopolies. Once upon a time, the progressive mantle was to provide hope to the hopeless, and to fight against powerful monied interests. Now, the goal is to attract the admiration of those whose lot in life is already looking up, and to castigate those who weren’t with her because they “didn't like black people getting rights”. (As if people are still angry about something that happened fifty fucking years ago. Top tip: if you’re blaming an electoral loss on something that happened before the median voter was even born, your explanation is just pure cope.)
Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens has achieved that special status where it is trite both to say you love the book and to say you hate it, but there is one idea in the book, which he expands upon in his next book Homo Deus, that has always stuck with me: the power of humanity’s belief in progress. Before the modern age, humans believed that life was a zero-sum game, that the amount of resources in the world never changed. For some to win, others would have to lose. In contrast, “modernity is based on the firm belief that economic growth is not only possible, but absolutely essential”. Because we believe the future can and will be better, we invest in making it so, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Contrast the view of modernity with that of the dark ages, when we believe that we are a fallen species and that the future was not going to be any better than the miserable present, so we didn’t invest in the future, creating another self-fulfilling prophecy.
Clinton claimed that “[Trump’s] whole campaign, 'Make America Great Again,' was looking backwards”, but she was only half right. The difference between Clinton voters and Trump voters was that the latter needed to be convinced that there really were better days ahead. In typical Trump fashion, he correctly identifies a problem, and then finds its solution in the only place that it could not possibly be. ‘Okay we need to find a source to believe in a brighter future … where should we look … I know! The past!’. His campaign was paradoxically about the past and the future at the same time. It may sound hoaky to say, but the United States of America is a country founded on the optimism that is foundational to modernity, so when even American voters agree that our best days are in the past, and that we need to be convinced to believe in the future, it’s time to start worrying.
Do we even believe in the future with enough faith to realise its potential?
Clinton was right her people were once optimistic, but a combination of Trump’s election and COVID has broken the belief in better days of the Clinton places that were supposedly ‘moving forward’. Don’t look forward to your wedding, that concert, your trip to Italy, because all it takes is a new Greek letter you’ve never heard of to make its way onto your newsfeed, and suddenly everything you’ve been looking forward to, *poof* it’s gone. New variants and case numbers hang over the heads of the COVID-cautious like the Sword of Damocles, ready to decapitate whatever it was you were looking forward to. Better not to plan than to have those plans taken away from us unceremoniously, and we begin to see optimism as a recipe for disappointment.
In recent days, Biden has been telling us to expect food shortages in what feels like the final nail in the coffin of our optimism. While he once spoke (generally unconvincingly) of building back better, now we just feel like we’ll be lucky if we have enough food to keep our bellies full. Biden himself is the perfect avatar for this decline: once a spry and animated figure, he is now difficult to watch. As I watch him speak, I find myself just hoping he will find his way to the end of the sentence. The Presidency, once an office that commanded grandeur, now elicits pity and regularly declares its own impotence, claiming it can’t fix the most basic problems in society.
A representative sentiment in the Biden age
I have to admit that I originally found it hard to understand the cavalier indifference to nuclear war that has been floating around recently. At first, I thought people just didn’t get that a No-Fly Zone means nuclear war (declaring a No-Fly Zone means shooting down both Russian planes and anti-aircraft weapons) or understand what nuclear war really entailed (there is no such thing as a small-scale nuclear war, no matter what anyone says). Nuclear war is the end of the human project. No more art, culture, life, friendship, love. It is worse than death, because at least in death your memory may be carried on. Nuclear war means the true erasure of everything that came before.
But, in a sense, it’s just a logical extension of our current malaise. If things are going to just keep getting worse, what’s the point? While before modernity they didn’t believe things were ever going to get better, at least they weren’t getting worse. A worrying reason the prospect of nuclear war isn’t eliciting the proper fear from our body politic is perhaps many feel that it is better to just end it all in one fell swoop, rather than experience managed decline. If you stop believing in the future, you no longer need to believe in a future.
However, managed decline is not inevitable. If a better future depends upon a belief in that better future, then it is not a forgone conclusion that the future looks worse than the past. But it can’t just be a select few who believe in the future. We need a massive wave of optimism, and for that, we need a leader who can inspire a new wave of optimism. And it can’t be a geriatric like Reagan, it needs to be someone younger, with something at stake in that future. But all we have for now are politicians like Clinton who blame voters for not being optimistic enough, leaders like Trump who think the future literally resides in the past, and people past their prime like Biden who tell us to buckle up, because it’s about to get rough.
Your best piece yet!