It's Not the Vibes, Stupid
The economic pundits are freaking out again. A new poll finds that a majority of Americans think the economy is declining, when it is actually growing. Half of us believe the stock market is crashing, when it is reaching new highs. Half of us also believe unemployment is at a disastrous 50-year high, when it is sustaining record lows.
Why are we Americans so stupid? Why are we so blind to a healthy economy? It’s all in our messed-up heads, we are told. We are bringing bad vibes to the good times, they say.
Lee Drutman, in his Substack, wonders if our brains are hard-wired to be ever alert to threats, more than to good news. Perhaps social media has learned how to get more clicks by focusing on threat after threat, even imaginary ones. Paul Krugman, who has been chirping on the "vibecession" for nearly two years, believes it relates to the polarization of American politics, also amplified by social media. The Republicans stir the pot by mindlessly attacking anything and everything Democrats do, he argues. All of this gets our animal juices flowing so that we reflexively see bad, bad, bad.
Expecting the political establishment to reform itself is folly. It takes pressure from a mass movement to force meaningful change.
I think these very savvy analysts are looking for love in all the wrong places. They are ignoring a key long-term trend: Fewer and fewer people trust the government. And probably even fewer believe what government-friendly analysts write. The bond between citizens and government was smashed long before Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene came onto the scene.
When President Lyndon Johnson won in a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964, a colossal 77 percent of Americans had trust in the federal government. The government had earned it through the battle against the crippling economic depression in the 1930s, the fight against fascism during WWII, and its stewardship over a prospering economy in the 1950s, when the gap between the rich and the rest of us reached historic lows. Black Americans also saw the federal government as an ally in breaking Jim Crow in the South. And labor unions, which then represented more than 30 percent of the workforce, believed they had formed a permanent national partnership with government and corporations to improve the standard of living of all working people. Government, in 1964, was viewed as a force for good.
What happened?
The federal government blew it. The best and the brightest in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations led the country into the Vietnam War and repeatedly lied to the nation about its progress. In 1960 there were 900 American troops stationed in South Vietnam to prop up an unpopular government. By 1968 there were more than 500,000, and U.S. generals wanted to double that number. More and more Americans started to believe that it was not possible, or moral, to use military might to interfere with Vietnam’s struggle for independence, even if the revolt was led by communists. Whatever your view of the war in Vietnam, there is no doubt that it tore our country apart.
Johnson, who had pushed through historic civil rights legislation, as well as launching the Medicare and Medicaid programs, became a hated figure, especially in the eyes of young people subject to the military draft. Yet even in 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated and troops were sent to put down riots in urban areas, a remarkable 62 percent of the country still approved of the federal government. The public may have wanted new leadership, but the government itself was still viewed positively.
The Vietnam War, however, continued for another seven years and ended in abject failure, further alienating millions of Americans, especially young people. And then came Watergate. Journalistic and congressional inquiry revealed that President Nixon and his key advisors were involved in a vast array of crimes and coverups of their interference in the rights of their political opponents, especially Vietnam War critics. By the time Nixon resigned from office in 1974, government approval had fallen to 36 percent. At that........
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