Daniel Drezner of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy has an essay at his Substack that he clearly intends readers to take as a note of cheer. It's entitled "Is the Country Getting . . . Better?"
Now, Drezner has a track record that appeals to me. He was a registered Republican who supported the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. He publicly expressed his misgivings about Donald Trump by being a signatory to a letter from several national-security specialists in 2016, and left the GOP. a year later. My kind of guy in a very important sense.
And I appreciate his guarded optimism in this piece. He begins by spelling out how gloomy things have looked for the past several years:
The last six years or so have felt like one of those video boxing games in which the announcer yells “body blow” on repeat, but for the entire country. The United States has been through a lot, from the chaos of the Trump administration to the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic to the disruptions of the George Floyd protests to the violence of January 6th to the uncertainties of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I’m eliding a lot in that last sentence but you get the point. These have been interesting times to live through, which is a polite way of saying they have been exhausting.
Along with the big shocks came a host of smaller tells suggesting that America had lost its damn mind. Data points like the rise in “air rage” and “road rage” incidents suggested a country in which the social fabric was being torn asunder. The midterm elections, featuring a whole host of truly oddball candidates, seemed to be another sign that bad things were coming down the pike. Some of my political science colleagues were gaming out how a second Civil War could emerge.
I'm not sure that the balm he applies to the current juncture has much depth to it, however:
Then something unexpected happened: by albeit razor-thin margins, normalcy seemed to make a comeback. The midterm elections proved to be infertile soil for nutjob candidates in swing states; Raphael Warnock’s defeat of werewolf-loving Herschel Walker in Georgia was the cherry on top of this delicious normalcy sundae. As Axios’ Jim VandeHei put it: “The past few months prove that for all the hyperventilating and self-loathing, normal America is prevailing over the loudmouths on the left and the right who dominate our screens…. Yes, politics remains alarmingly polarized and Twitter, a hot mess. At the same time, most of America is busy being more nuanced and normal than what you often see on the screen.”
Now, when one juxtaposes Warnock as a foil to Walker, one can say we did indeed dodge a bullet. But Warnock is no centrist. He's tried to play the race card to whitewash his brother's drug conviction. He claims that he's on solid ground as a Christian pastor in his position that abortion is fine even up to moments before birth. His shoddy behavior as a father is at odds with his advocacy for women and children. And he wanted to see a federal election law enacted to head Georgia's law off at the pass, even though that law did not hamper voter turnout.
But back to Drezner's piece. He cites statistics concerning social ill such as road rage to bolster his case:
Is there evidence for Hayes’ supposition? There’s some! A glance at the Federal Aviation Administration’s data shows that the number of air rage incidents per flight has declined considerably during 2022, which is impressive given the number of flight delays and cancellations that occurred earlier this year. The decline appears to be due to a combination of the FAA pursuing a “no tolerance” policy combined with the end of the mask mandate on flights. Road rage data is a little harder to come by, but the number of motor-vehicle fatalities is trending ever-so-slightly downward compared to 2021. The murder rate also appears to have declined compared to 2021. Some economic stresses, like inflation or supply chain disruptions, appear to be easing as well.
But what I want to know is this: Has he established a baseline from which he's able to form a metric?
Because the Overton window has been dramatically shifting for many years. Consider that Barack Obama came into office as president proclaiming his stance that marriage was between one man and one woman. Some years later, when Obergefell v Hodges was decided, he had the White House lit up in rainbow colors. Now we have a transgender Health and Human Services secretary. DEI is pervasive throughout government at all levels.
In a piece I wrote at my own Substack earlier this year, I made the case that the window shift goes back decades. In the course of making my point, I cited some statistics that don't paint a pretty picture at all:
Some very basic aspects of American life that were taken as givens in my childhood have undergone profound changes in ensuing decades. The marriage rate, in steady decline for years, fell to an all-time low in 2018. As of 2019, the US had the highest number of children living in a single-parent household in the world.
Three in ten Americans are now religiously unaffiliated.
Drug-overdose deaths in the US reached another record high this year.
As we all know, the spree-killing trend, which got underway in 1966, when Charles Whitman ascended the University of Texas campus tower in Austin and shot 16 people, has made our present year a grim succession of carnage scenes of near-daily occurrence.
So I'd say Drezner's search for a ray of sunlight depends on accepting that we ease into the way things are at the expense of having a conversation about how they should be.
But, then, it might be awfully late in the day for me to hope for something like that.
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