Twice a week, Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, writes a column for the New York Times in which he tries to reassure Americans that the economy is OK, that we are on track for a soft landing after the massive disruptions of COVID. Krugman is popular in the opinion section and, unlike other columnists, is not a niche read. But he has a lot of frenemies. Commenters write that he just doesn’t get it. The chide him for not mentioning price gouging and corporate greed. It’s always the price of eggs they bring up. They also point out things like their wages not having increased in five years. This is one of the rare places in the New York Times where you hear from people who literally don’t have enough cash on hand. Leftist populism lives here, and though this is a small demographic in a non-news-reading America, it’s telling.

The inflation—on top of the MAGA insurgency, the continuing workplace and social disruptions from COVID, Putin’s war, and climate disasters—is making those on the left anxious and uncertain. They find it hard to defend Joe Biden because they want something sudden and new to fix it all. They want a reset from . . . from what exactly?

On the other side, all talkers about the economy come straight from Fox News and far-right TikTok, not economists. The other side doesn’t have newspapers. They don’t actually have “news.” What they have is Donald Trump. They know their enemies: non-white immigrants they call “illegals,” woke elites, and transgender athletes. And Biden, as the source of all evil, is making everything expensive. For three years, they’ve believed that we are living in the worst cesspool the world has ever seen.

Back in March, into the grim headlines about our colliding crises came an avalanche of data showing an epidemic of teen depression and suicide, and suddenly everyone seemed to have a theory about why the mental health of America’s young people has rapidly deteriorated over the past 15 years. Researchers made a case for social media as a primary driver, and many phone apologists pushed back. In a now-deleted tweet, the Washington Post’s social media reporter Taylor Lorenz said that the real cause for teen depression was obvious: “we’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic [with] record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world.” She then absurdly suggested that young people in the 1950s were materially better off than young people today.

I doubt that Lorenz was siding with Trump and MAGA in her defense of our addictive digital consumption that has given her a lucrative career. But any sense that Americans’ daily lives are worse now than the 1950s is not true. Much of the population in that decade lived in constant fear of nuclear war, and large populations of Black people lived in a segregated world below the poverty line. They couldn’t get paid the same as white people. They couldn’t vote. They couldn’t get a decent education for their children. (Given that Lorenz is a white woman who grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, it’s not hard to see why she deleted that tweet.)

It is naïve for anyone in the press not to see that we’ve been here before—many times before. I remember as a teenager seeing television news make a big deal out of American unhappiness in relation to Network (1976). I recently watched a clip from that movie—the famous rant of Peter Finch’s character Howard Beale—and was struck by its eerie timeliness: “The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust [in Silicon Valley], shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter [or in plain sight at Disney World]. Punks are running wild in the street [on scooters and e-bikes].” And: “We know the air is unfit to breathe [with wildfire smoke] and our [ultra-processed] food is unfit to eat.” And: “I don’t know what to do about the depression [of our teens] and the inflation and the Russians [in Ukraine] and the crime in the street [or the aisles of a CVS].”

Having the same problems as 1976 is not progress, and I admit that climate change has fated us in a way that will likely be deadlier than even Hitler’s storm troopers. But in what other time have middle-class Americans spent so much money on music, sports, and gaming entertainment; on dining out; and on global travel while simultaneously complaining that they lived in a hellscape? When you woke up American in the 1950s, your options of what you could do and where you could go that day were limited even beyond your race, gender, social class, and physical ability and health. There were boundaries of time and space; you were tethered by physical circumstance. The level of comfort, convenience, and mobility in most people’s lives has improved astoundingly in 70 years.

We live within a cultural fugue that makes sorting out the sources of our unhappiness difficult. It may feel like the problems of the inflationary post-COVID world are the breaking point, but how can that be when we have got through the year of half a million deaths? Why have we let ourselves and our children become unable to deal with the challenges of our time?

Donald Trump showed us that the easiest, most irrational, and most child-like solution to individual unhappiness is to find an enemy to blame and hate. In May 2015, even before he announced his candidacy the first time, he complained: “This country is a hellhole. We are going down fast and I’m a conservative but I have a big heart. I will take care of people.” Trump implanted the idea that people’s problems weren’t of their own making, and that he alone could make the problems go away by punishing the people who caused those problems. Trump’s people don’t blame Trump for their problems not going away, because they fully believe that only with the suffering of the enemy will that happen.

The easy fix chosen by half the country in 2016 has made all of us suffer in a way that hasn’t gone away. But that’s still no reason for the left’s surrendering agency. The cause of our hellscape vibe predates COVID and Trump and the election of Obama that was the reason for Trump. It predates the recession and the never-ending wars abroad. It was created by a half-century of neoliberal capitalism and a quarter century of Silicon Valley neoliberal capitalism. “Under the neoliberal regime,” Jackson Lears explains in Animal Spirits (2023), “each person becomes a piece of ‘human capital’—a little firm with assets, debts, and a credit score anxiously scrutinized for signs of success or failure, much as Calvinists scrutinized their souls for evidence of salvation or damnation. The neoliberal self intrudes instrumentalism market assumptions into every corner of existence of human experience, accelerating the pricing of everyday life—down to and including the calculation of a human being’s monetary value.”

These antagonists—corporate America and Wall Street—have paid generations of politicians to take the supposedly free-market system we are forced to live in and rig it against us. They have made most Americans poorer since the time of Network. They bribed Washington to cut their taxes while they kept middle-class wages lower than the rate of inflation. They killed unions and any effort to increase the minimum wage. The gross income equality generated by their exploits has left Americans unable to buy a house, and their private equity takeover of the housing stock has made the cost of renting astronomical everywhere. They use our pension system as a casino. The three largest asset managers—BlackRock, Vanguard Group, and State Street—own about 22% of the average S&P 500 company, wielding unprecedented power over each individual firm they own and in which our retirement money is invested. They bribed the Supreme Court to give them more electoral power than us, allowing them to manipulate elections via the Citizens United ruling.

Our oligarch overlords have hurt our health, our livelihood, and our environment. Their tax cuts and government handouts are paid for by money that would otherwise be used for fair and equitable systems of healthcare and public education. They’ve consistently gutted employer-base healthcare to offload the burden onto their workers. Their tax cuts and government handouts are also paid for by the climate mitigation policies and programs we do not have, and their ruthless fossil fuels lobby has killed any congressional effort to limit carbon emissions or pursue alternate energy.

They have manipulated our behaviors to steal our autonomy, make us docile, and turn us against each other. Beginning in 1989, their importation of cheap stuff from China did not just decimate domestic manufacturing; it also narcotized us with a continual striving for choice and abundance. We became a country with a two-car garage full of shit but without ownership of the house the garage is attached to. We don’t have the fundamental wealth of property, of adequate healthcare, or of enough money to survive a job loss or retirement.

They have encouraged those who do have the wealth of property to quietly withdraw from America’s democratic government in what free-market radicals call soft secession. As Quinn Slobodian explains in Crack-up Capitalism (2023): “We can secede by removing children from state-run schools, converting currency into gold or cryptocurrency, relocating to states with lower taxes, obtaining a second passport, or expatriating to a tax haven. We can secede, and many have, by joining gated communities to create private governments in miniature. By the new millennium, about half of all new developments in the American South and West were gated and master-planned.”

Even before the internet, our overlords made every kind of information Americans consumed via television into entertainment, meaning that for 30 years, Fox News was allowed to lie and exploit with increasing cynicism and malice. Our overlords pushed net neutrality to the neoliberals in Washington, with the result that the internet is awash in misinformation. With internet consumption (sports, sex, shopping) and social media, they made us dopamine addicts, so that we fall apart or lash out if everything in our lives is not delivered instantly on demand.

The rigged system maintained by these overlords takes away our agency, pitting us as consuming individuals against everyone else. Trump—who made his reputation reducing all human interaction to winners and losers—arrived on this scene and immediately released the most craven instincts of Fox News nation, amplifying their lust for consumption and excess over equitability and fairness.

A widely publicized incident in Montgomery, Alabama, on August 5 resonated with a lot of Americans not feeling that great about their country. An altercation between a co-captain of a excursion riverboat and the owners of a pontoon boat escalated into a brawl that people presumed was racially motivated. The fighting at the downtown riverfront was certainly ugly, but the core of the hostilities was this: a few people didn’t want to move their pontoon boat so that a riverboat carrying 277 passengers could dock in the designated space. The riverboat crew had reportedly tried to reach the owners of the pontoon boat by using their loudspeaker, but the owners “responded with vulgar language and hand gestures.” The mayor of Montgomery later told the press that “this is not indicative of who we are.” Most people watching the clip of the fighting thought that this is exactly who we are: a few individuals thinking that their fun matters more than 277 people stuck on a boat.

Other things indicative of who we are: A survey published in The Wall Street Journal on March 27 showing steep declines in the things Americans say are very important to them. In 1998, 70% of Americans said patriotism was very important; this year only 38%—and only 23% of adults under 30—said so. Same big declines with religion, hard work, volunteering in the community, and having children. According to the Journal, “The only priority . . . tested that has grown in importance in the past quarter-century is money,” going from being very important to 31% in 1998 to 43% this year, among Democrats and Republicans equally.

All this is to say that if you think that living in the Hellscape Acres of your mind is the result of Joe Biden forcing pronouns on you, you know nothing of the modern world. Since the arrival of Trump and his free-market lying, we’ve been told by academia and the responsible press that the reason his misinformation spreads unchecked is because Americans have lost trust in government and institutions. What they didn’t tell us is that this lost trust would metastasize into losing trust in the common sense and common decency of one another. A country that consisted solely of Trump voters could never be a functioning collective; it would be like a parasite forced to feed on itself. I think this is why Ukraine’s heroic fight to preserve its sovereignty has been felt by the left in the United States and the West so strongly: Ukrainians still have a fundamental common cause that is not controlled by their collective id. They’ve hunkered down in the same place doing old-fashioned hard. In a world that lives by the GPS of shipping containers, few people, least of all Americans, are willing to do old-fashioned hard.

So before we blame phones or politicians or social media platforms for children and teens being unable to cope with the society we have made, we must look at our own behaviors and patterns of consumption and connectivity. I’m sure there are many who resisted being dragged by the undercurrent, but we’ve all had to change to some degree to live in the narcissistic world of consumption forced on us by our oligarch overlords. Of all the things people seem to want to run back and grab from the 1950s, acting civilly to your neighbors and respecting people different from yourself don’t seem to be among them. How far back do you have to go, I wonder, if you just want to make the American people good again? §