To assess whether these are good-and-getting-better times or the opposite, you need a meaningful gauge

One of the favorite parlor games of our age is kicking around the question of whether we are living in unprecedentedly good times or bad, or something in between. The latest entry is today's Washington Examiner piece by Michael Barone.  He comes down in the good-and-getting-better side of the ledger, and cites some pretty convincing developments.

But he does so after having framed the dichotomy in a way I find really unsatisfying:

President Trump, enjoying all-but-unanimous support from Republicans in polls, tells us that we are living at the brink of disaster, at risk of being sucked under the sludge by vicious creatures of the swamp.

Trump opponents, including almost the whole of the Democratic Party and a tattered but still loudly chirping fragment of the Republican Party, assure us that we are entering the dark night of Nazism, racism, and violent suppression of all dissenting opinion.

Now, I'm no Trump fan, as any longtime reader of this site knows, but Trump's message with regard to the swamp being a sinister force, as gleaned from his tweets, press conferences and rallies is one of confidence in counter-forces being able to prevail against it. Yes, he's delusional about his own powers of agency (witness the failure of North Korea outreach) and the extent to which the enthusiasm of his base enhances those powers, but that's how he sees it.

And Barone's lumping in of "a tattered but still loudly chirping fragment of the Republican Party" - that would be me, along with The Dispatch, The Resurgent, The Bulwark, most National Review writers and the Principles First movement - with Democrats is intellectually sloppy. Barone, who built his reputation on having his finger on the pulse of the American electorate, should have done a little sorting out here. There are three main political forces at work in 2019: Trumpists, conservatives and leftists. More on this point momentarily.

But, as I say, Barone does cite some developments that must be acknowledged:

. . . the science writer and British House of Lords voting member Matt Ridley, [writing] in the British Spectator [says,] “We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history,” he writes of the decade just ending.

Olden times may look better in warm memories — think of multiepisode dramas about Edwardian noblemen or carefully curated statistics showing narrower pay gaps between 1950s CEOs and assembly-line workers. But the cold, hard numbers tell another story.

“Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born,” Ridley writes, referring to the year 1958, a time that some of us can actually remember.

Of course, you may say, the economic progress made since China and India discovered the magic of free markets has helped people over there; but over here, in advanced countries, we’re not growing. We are just gobbling up and wolfing down more of the world’s limited resources, aren't we?

Not so, replies Ridley. Consumers in advanced countries are actually consuming less stuff (biomass, metals, minerals, or fossil fuels) per capita, even while getting more nutrition and production out of it. Thank technological advancement and, yes, in some cases, government regulations.

We’re also experiencing, as a world and in advanced countries, less violence and more in the way of peace, international and domestic. That’s the argument of Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Wars are more infrequent and less deadly than in the past.

So too has violent crime abated in the U.S. and other advanced nations. It used to be taken as given that disadvantaged young males, especially those minorities discriminated against, were hugely likely to commit violent crimes. Now, thanks to improved policing and changed attitudes, far fewer do so.

The natural tendency of most people is to ignore positive trends. They are not the lead stories on your local newscast, nor are they mentioned in the shouting matches on cable news. People usually focus on complaints and grievances. And there are indeed worrying negative countertrends, such as the opioid abuse that has cut life expectancies down for some demographic groups.

We tend to focus on negative trends, though, even after they’ve been reversed. Illegal border crossings peaked just before the 2007-08 financial crisis and are much fewer, though not zero, today. Wages for low-skilled workers for years rose little or not at all, as politicians of both parties complained. Since 2016, they’ve been rising faster than average, but only Trump’s fans seem to have noticed; Democrats probably will if the trend continues when their party has the White House.

One can even make the case that in places where we lament sluggish economic growth — Japan since 1990, continental Europe since 2001, the U.S. from 2007 up through 2017 — living standards still remain more than comfortable, judged by any historic perspective.

I'm kind of surprised he didn't include the technological-advances angle. Most of these it's-never-been-better types bringup the wonders of the cell phone, and often bring in medical advances like laser surgery.

Still, it's clear where he's coming from by the time he winds up his essay. Materially, these are time that would amaze the average citizen of the US - or, for that matter, of most nations of the world - as recently as 40 years ago.

Now, with regard to the basis on which he lumps together leftists and this "chirping fragment," it is, in Barone's formulation, trepidation about a "dark night of Nazism, racism, and violent suppression of all dissenting opinion," That is indeed what the Left wrings its hands about. But any kind of familiarity with what anti-Trump conservatism bases its argument on will make someone conclude that this group's position is based on the level of character. Most anti-Trump conservatives aren't worried about the spread of some form of Nazism, don't think racism is on the resurgence, and, while they are cognizant of Trumpism's attempts to marginalize them and their outlets of expression, don't foresee "violent suppression of all dissenting opinion" in the horizon. 

Their- our - main point of departure from what the Republican Party has become is the list of Trump's personality traits that everyone, including the most die-hard Trumpist, has to see and deal with: the pettiness, the vindictiveness, the transactional lens through which he views everything ("I've done so much for blacks / evangelical Christians / particular politicians, now it's time to get political support in return."), the utter incoherence of his economic policy (following up truly great tax cuts with protectionist measures) and his foreign policy (the utter waste of time that was the summits with Kim, the pullout from northern Syria just as Turkey was coming after the Kurds, the mess he made of his sideline meetings at the latest G-7 summit), the public vulgarity, his obvious personal ambivalence about the essence of Christianity, had sybaritic track record with women, his lack of intellectual curiosity, and his approach of eschewing preparation and just winging it in everything. 

And, of course, the Trumpist response to this is along the lines of "I wasn't voting for a pastor." 

And this speaks volumes about the larger context of the trouble post-America and Western civilization generally finds itself in. The mindset of "more and more people are getting three squares a day" provides no room for transcendent matters. 

Smiley-face pieces such as Barone's tend not to grapple with statistics regarding family formation, single-parent households, church attendance, and the post-American public's abysmal understanding of its own history and civilizational underpinnings. Even if one keeps the discussion on the level of society's material progress, there is the phenomenon of major US cities's streets being defiled with the feces, urine and needles, deposited huge numbers of people who have consciously chosen to poison themselves. 

And what's the next step beyond downward trends in marriage and family formation? Distortion of the notion of family itself, codified, as it works its way toward full mainstreaming, by such moves as Obergefell v Hodges. The above-mentioned post-American public's abysmal understanding of its own history and civilizational underpinnings feeds this. The post-American public is no longer interested in contemplating the fact that, prior to the last twenty years at the outset, no culture anywhere in the world at any tine in history included the union of two people of the same sex in its definition of marriage. 

And what's the next step beyond stretching the definition of family beyond anything recognizable? An infantile pretense that an individual's maleness or femaleness isn't integral to who that individual is. Grown adults and long-standing institutions - think universities, municipal governments, and, increasingly, corporations - with a perfectly serious demeanor speaking of people having the right to define themselves, to be deserving of the "respect" and "courtesy" of being addressed by whatever pronouns they wish to be addressed by. 

The Trump phenomenon is merely another sign of our breakdown. We don't insist on basic coherence anymore, much less human conduct that accords with eternal verities. 

Pieces like Barone's have a hint of desperation to them. He concludes with this statement"

. . . at year’s and decade’s end, our grumbling society is closer to the best than to the worst of times.

For how long, Mr. Barone? How long is our present circumstance sustainable when people can make up their basic identity and insist that others, with the backing of enforceable law, treat them as if that identity is real? How long, given the dwindling number of healthy male role models in families and society alike? How long, when there are even fractures within Christianity, between adherents of sound doctrine, former adherents of sound doctrine who have come under the sway of the Trump phenomenon, prosperity-gospel hucksters, and denominations that have completely jettisoned sound doctrine and no longer make Christ central to their raison d'être?

Even if a convincing argument can be mounted that our current state, in which more people are healthy, well-fed, safe and comfortable, can continue for a long time, the question persists: to what end?