A Nation with a Tired Playbook

 

On national identity, threat, and how deep the blade went under the skin

When I first moved to the United States, one of the things that struck me most was the country’s humor and vernacular optimism. Americans seemed trained to turn discomfort into jokes and uncertainty into possibility. Coming from a society with a different emotional weather, that was not a small difference. It felt structural.

For years, liberal comedy did this especially well. It made absurdity breathable. It took hypocrisy, bureaucracy, corruption, bad faith, moral panic, and institutional stupidity and turned them into oxygen. The joke did not erase the danger, but it created enough space to survive recognizing it.

That is why I do not observe the thinning of that humor as a minor cultural detail. In my view, humor and optimism were part of the American operating system. When a society that once metabolized absurdity through jokes begins preserving dread at full strength, something has changed.

The problem is not that Americans, or liberals in particular, suddenly became less funny. The problem is that politics became too compelling, too consequential, and too deranged to remain safely comic.

Every day delivers a fresh spectacle: courts, billionaires, executive orders, corruption, cruelty, constitutional dread. The material arrives pre-satirized. You do not even need to get creative. Reality keeps walking onstage wearing the costume.

That sounds like a gift to comedians, but it is not. Comedy needs absurdity with a little room around it. It needs enough distance for the body to say: this is insane, but I can breathe around it. When the absurdity has legal force, police force, market force, or institutional consequence, the laugh does not fully release. The body knows the joke can still hurt you.

So the tone changes. The comedian becomes a witness. The satirist becomes an archivist. The late-night monologue becomes less a release valve than a nightly inventory of damage. What used to make absurdity breathable now often preserves danger at full strength.

This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of distance. You cannot live every evening inside “their finest hour.” A nervous system cannot afford a daily version of Churchill announcing Britain’s entrance into World War II, even when some of the alarms are real.

America is not merely polarized. It is trying to regulate itself on a dancing landscape.

Everything that should provide ground has begun to move: parties, courts, platforms, media, prices, borders, identity, work, truth, expertise, even the weather. The result is not just disagreement. It is a national nervous system running threat detection at high volume.

The American model is legacy software running on that dancing landscape. It was built for another era, when the United States reigned more confidently, industry occupied more of the social imagination, and adulthood could still be narrated as a sequence: job, house, savings, retirement, inheritance. That world was never as fair or universal as nostalgia claims, but it was stable enough to make the model believable.

Now the ground moves, but the script remains. Households are still told to optimize, invest, hustle, insure, retrain, borrow, and believe in the future, while ordinary life becomes a sequence of cliffs: rent, medical bills, childcare, debt, layoffs, insurance, groceries, one missed paycheck, one broken car.

This is where the stock market becomes offensive.

Not because a rising market is bad in itself, but because of what it is asked to symbolize. Survey after survey says roughly a third of Americans lack even a few hundred dollars of emergency cushion; many could not cover a $400 or $500 shock without borrowing, selling something, or moving closer to the red line. And yet the Dow, the Nasdaq, and the S&P keep smiling from their evergreen all-time-high peak, as if the dashboard were proof that the machine is healthy.

The split screen is obscene.

The chart says abundance.
The household says threat.
The index says historic high.
The kitchen table says one more bill.

This is not simply inequality. It is a crisis of interpretation. The country is told to read market highs as national health, while millions of households experience the same economy as fragility, exposure, and triage.

Automation sharpens the contradiction. If the old model depended on labor scarcity being solved by more labor, the new model is less clear. Machines, software, and AI do not eliminate the need for workers everywhere, but they do change the social imagination of work. Stable labor positions begin to feel less abundant, less durable, less able to absorb everyone.

In that environment, the cons of immigration become easier to dramatize than the pros. The immigrant may still be economically useful, even necessary, in whole sectors of the economy. But politically, the figure begins to look less like labor and more like pressure.

 A society under that much contradiction needs an explanation it can touch. So it turns toward the immigrant.

This is not an accident. Immigrant labor has long been useful to the economy alive: in fields, kitchens, construction sites, care work, cleaning, delivery, meatpacking, warehouses, hotels, and all the places where the official economy prefers not to look directly at its own dependencies. The immigrant body has been used as infrastructure: underpaid, overworked, politically exposed, socially deniable.

But at a certain point, the value changes.

The economy once needed the immigrant hidden in the kitchen, field, warehouse, or care home. Now power can use that same body as evidence, warning, spectacle, and offering. The worker who helped keep the machine running becomes proof that the machine was invaded.

This is the sacrificial logic. The legacy model is failing, but the failure is too large, too distributed, too abstract, too implicated in everyone’s arrangements. Financialization cannot be shouted at from a rally stage with the same visceral satisfaction. Asset inflation does not have a face. Deindustrialization is too historical. Healthcare is too bureaucratic. Housing scarcity is too local and too national at once. The dancing landscape has too many causes.

The immigrant simplifies the landscape.

Here is a body.
Here is a border.
Here is a story.
Here is the thing that crossed.
Here is the reason you are afraid.

The cruelty is that both legal and illegal immigrants can be absorbed into the same ritual. Legality matters administratively, but politically the category can be blurred whenever the machinery needs a larger offering. The point is not accuracy. The point is conversion: anxiety into anger, precarity into blame, structural failure into a human target.

The immigrant is made to carry a contradiction the society cannot metabolize. A country that depended on the labor now performs outrage at the presence. A market that benefited from the worker now lets politics treat the body as contamination. The person who helped keep the machine running becomes evidence that the machine was invaded.

That is why the sacrifice is propitiatory. It does not solve the crisis. It gives the crisis a victim.

The old model cannot admit that the ground has changed. So it asks for a body.

There. That is why the gods are angry.

The armor failed, but the forge is not gone

What worries me most is not any single item on this list. Not the market, not the media, not the border, not even the politics of blame. It is the possibility that all of it has gone under the skin.

A country can survive bad policy, bad markets, bad leaders, bad news cycles. What is harder to survive is a change in temperament: when humor stops functioning as oxygen, when optimism becomes performance, when precarity becomes identity, when politics becomes weather, when sacrifice becomes explanation.

That is why noticing the change matters. Noticing is not enough, but it is not nothing. A society cannot repair what it keeps misnaming. If dread has replaced humor, if spectacle has replaced explanation, if scapegoating has replaced diagnosis, then the first constructive act may be to say so clearly.

The point is not to recover a naive optimism. The old optimism belonged to an older landscape. But there may be another kind: not the optimism of denial, but the optimism of refusing the sacrifice. The optimism of insisting that the dancing ground is real, that the model is old, that the anger has causes, and that no body should be asked to carry them all.

The World´s New Disorder

These thoughts grew out of reading two articles that approach the new political moment from almost opposite directions: Yascha Mounk’s TheBest-Case Scenario for the Trump Presidency and Simon Kuper’s How to Avert Catastrophe.

Mounk’s warning against certainty is persuasive. Confident predictions of disaster can be just as simplistic as reflexive optimism. Political systems are complicated, institutions are resilient in ways we do not always anticipate, and events have an irritating tendency to refuse the scripts we write for them.

But Kuper makes the opposite point equally difficult to dismiss: societies are often remarkably bad at recognizing catastrophe before it arrives.

The problem may be that we are much better at imagining continuity than rupture. We expect tomorrow to resemble yesterday, perhaps with different actors and somewhat different policies. We are less comfortable imagining that the rules themselves might change.

The disorder I fear is not merely economic. Trade, military power, alliances, finance, and political influence have become parts of the same tightly connected system.

Globalization has advanced too far to be treated as though it were merely a policy preference that individual governments can switch on or off. Production, finance, trade, communications, investment, and supply chains now cross borders so deeply that countries can inflict damage on one another without firing a shot.

That interdependence has usually been treated as a stabilizing force. There is a reason for that. Prosperous countries make good customers. Open markets create incentives to preserve relationships. It is generally more profitable to trade with another country than to destabilize it.

But interdependence cuts both ways.

The same networks that allow goods, capital and technology to move efficiently can also become instruments of pressure. A country that depends heavily on foreign markets, financing, suppliers or investors is not merely connected to the rest of the world. It is exposed to it.

For decades, the system has worked partly because its major participants accepted a basic bargain: compete aggressively, but remain inside a broadly shared economic framework.

What happens if that bargain begins to break down?

If the United States turns toward economic nationalism, pressures allies, threatens trading partners and treats access to its market as a weapon, other countries will not simply absorb the pressure indefinitely. They will look for leverage of their own. They may retaliate through tariffs, regulation, investment restrictions, currency policy, supply chains or alternative trading arrangements.

That is where the danger lies.

Globalization is not the opposite of liberal capitalism. In many respects, it is one of its consequences. Capital searches for markets, firms search for efficiencies, consumers search for cheaper goods and investors search for returns. Once those networks exist, political leaders cannot easily dismantle them without creating costs that travel in both directions.

A trade confrontation with China or Russia would therefore not resemble an old-fashioned contest in which one country simply closes its borders and waits for the other to surrender. Different political and economic systems have different vulnerabilities. More centralized governments may be able to direct capital, restrict ownership or absorb domestic pain in ways that more open economies cannot easily imitate. Open economies, meanwhile, possess their own advantages in innovation, capital formation and alliances.

The result would not necessarily be a clear winner.

It could instead be a world discovering, rather painfully, how much leverage everyone has acquired over everyone else.

And perhaps that is the real disorder ahead: not the end of globalization, but globalization without the political assumptions that made it relatively manageable.

Buckle Up Your Seatbelt: The World in 2017

The world is shifting. “McCarthyism” and the “War on Terror” will no longer be sufficient models for explaining the complexity of what is likely to unfold over the next few years.

Israel standing with Trump while Trump stands by Putin? In geopolitical terms, Putin’s objectives in the Middle East intersect in complicated ways with those of Iran. And economically, China can no longer conceal its intention to become a major player in this game.

A possible China-Russia-Iran axis is what concerns me most. Internal divisions within the United States may look small compared with the divisions taking shape across the world.

Then there is the surge of incendiary propaganda, coming both from Russia and from groups within the United States itself.

And there is more. Much more.

Watch the news with an open mind, and without assuming that tomorrow will look much like yesterday.

United States 2016 Elections: A Takeaway

Image by DonkeyHotey under Creative Commons License

One of my takeaways from the 2016 election is that Bernie Sanders’s campaign proved that “socialism” is no longer necessarily a disqualifying word in American politics.

But does socialism really belong inside the Democratic Party? I am not sure it does.

At the same time, Donald Trump’s campaign showed that nationalist politics, including rhetoric appealing to racial and cultural resentment, could command a significant place in the Republican coalition. Does that political current naturally belong within the traditional GOP? I am not sure of that either.

What struck me most about the election was that both parties appeared to contain movements larger than the ideological boundaries that had traditionally defined them.

The Democratic Party was being pulled by a growing faction openly questioning capitalism, inequality, and the limits of the existing economic order. The Republican Party was being pulled by a nationalist movement far less interested in the party’s traditional language of free trade, internationalism, and limited government.

Perhaps the most interesting question after 2016 is therefore not simply which party won.

It is whether the two-party system can continue absorbing political movements that increasingly seem to have identities of their own.

My guess is that it cannot do so indefinitely.

I suspect we will eventually see new parties emerge, or at least political movements that function increasingly like separate parties while continuing, for a time, to operate under the Democratic and Republican names.

Ferguson Aftermaths

Picture by Peoples World under Creative Common License

It took centuries for the United States to achieve even a measure of racial harmony. Many of us saw the inauguration of an African American president in 2009 as definitive proof of that hard-won mutual understanding. Yet the recent shooting of a young Black man in Ferguson, Missouri, and the reactions it provoked have cast doubt on that belief.

Is there a threat of Neo-Racism in the United States?

The country’s social balance now appears to be in crisis. Like any crisis, this one may also offer an opportunity for individual and collective growth.

Whether the events in Ferguson deepen existing divisions or open a path toward greater understanding will depend largely on how the communities involved respond. And the community involved is, ultimately, the whole of American society.

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Below is a painful expression of the cultural currents these events have stirred within the Black community.