. . . From Texan Kevin Williamson:
Where would Donald Trump . . . or Joe Biden be without pretending that things are worse in this country than they are, that we are always in some kind of national crisis, that things are always worse than they have ever been (until the right party has been in the White House for four years, at which point things are somehow better than they have ever been). People have always been unhappy in prospering societies: When there is peace and plenty, mediocrities have more time to think about their mediocrity and fewer excuses for it, and everybody has more time to think about the absurdity of human life and the finality of death. As Eric Hoffer argued in The True Believer, boredom is one the most powerful of all revolutionary forces. The life lived on purely material terms is meaningless, and its meaninglessness is revealed, perversely, by material prospering. That makes for bad politics, whether they end up being revolutionary or nihilistic. As T.S. Eliot wrote: “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.” Genteel hedonism is an inherently unstable social condition. Our schools and theaters are not being shot up by revolutionary masterminds or by desperate Guatemalan illegals tired after the long walk from Quiché but by the well-fed sexless dorks of the middle classes. We Americans have the world laid out before us like demigods but cannot, in too many cases, find in it anything worth living for. But nobody wants to hear how good we have it—tell people how bad they have it, though, and they’ll empty their pockets to hear more. |
The pattern holds true in politics, in entertainment, in journalism, in many other endeavors. Surely all this says something interesting and weird about the United States of America, Anno Domini 2023: We have it so good that the best way to get ahead is to pretend that we have it bad. |
