Social dissatisfaction and right wing revanchism:  comment

Paul Campos has a post up asking:  “What are the main sources of the immense amounts of social dissatisfaction that have fueled among other things the political ascent of the worst person in the history of American politics to the presidency?”  He lists several factors:

• Inflation
• Enshittification
• Conspicuous consumption in the age of social media
• Incel culture
• The continuing destruction of community life in an age of bowling alone, minus the bowling
• Doomscrolling

Campos’ discussion of these factors is worth reading.

Obviously, there is a considerable amount of bad luck involved in our current predicament.  Trump is in important ways sui generis.  The fact that the Republicans managed to stack the Supreme Court with pro-Trump extremists despite not dominating the presidency over the past 30-odd years is also partly just bad luck, although hardball also played a part.

But if we want to step back and ask about social and economic causes, I would argue that the two most important are

1) the Civil Rights Act and

2) the slowdown in the rate of economic growth following the thirty glorious years of strong growth after World War II. 

This second hypothesis, which is defended at length in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth by Benjamin Friedman, has unfortunately been somewhat neglected in popular discussions of democratic backsliding. 

Friedman’s argument (which he defends using detailed historical evidence from the United States and elsewhere) is roughly as follows:  When economic growth is rapid, people compare their present economic situation to their earlier, poorer condition, and feel that they have made progress.  They are satisfied with their lot in life.  This sense of satisfaction makes us more charitably disposed towards those who are less fortunate.  This explains why most of the progress we have made in extending economic opportunity to historically disadvantaged groups comes during periods of rapid growth.  Conversely, when people fail to make progress economically, they compare their frustrating situation to that of other people, and this makes them less generous towards social out-groups.

Friedman’s hypothesis is consistent with a few of the causes Campos mentions, especially “conspicuous consumption in the age of social media”.

If Friedman is right, then a big part of a post-Trump effort to inoculate ourselves against future demagogues is to increase the rate of economic growth.  This means, among other things, adopting the sorts of policies emphasized by Klein and Thompson in Abundance (“abundance” is just another term for economic growth that was chosen, I suspect, because of its potential to appeal to the anti-growth left).