I often quote a pundit named Kevin Drum here. I'll be quoting him less in the future because he's moving from a daily column to every-so-often blogging but I'm going to quote him now. He believes that the reason everyone thinks America is doomed is that everyone in America is telling everyone else in America that America is doomed.
Now, this is "apart from The Pandemic" and that's a pretty big thing to set aside. But that is (we hope) going to end soon and it is one of the few things we're actively working to fix. To quote Kevin…
Political parties that are out of power normally have a keen interest in making things sound terrible. After all, they have to promise to fix things in order to get the votes to get back in power, but nobody is interested in fixing things unless they're convinced they need fixing. So Republicans shout about the deficit and moral decay because those are well-known ways of scaring people into voting against Democrats. Democrats insist that the middle class is dying and Medicare is under assault, because those are well-known ways of scaring people into voting against Republicans.
This is all normal but it can become abnormal if both parties, along with pretty much every pundit, is insisting that the country is going to hell.
I don't agree 100% with that but I do think too many people approach elections with the same panic as Superman's biological father warning everyone that Krypton is about to explode and we'll all be killed. Except that Jor-El was right and everyone else was wrong.
The morning after Barack Obama was first elected, I got an e-mail from a Republican friend who warned that within four years, the same fate would befall Earth…if we were lucky. One or two years seemed much more likely. She was quite serious about this.
And last year around this time, a Democratic acquaintance was telling me the same thing was inevitable if we elected anyone other than Bernie Sanders. He was just as certain of that as the QAnon supporters who are still trying to come to grips with the fact that on Inauguration Day, Biden and Harris were inaugurated and not arrested.
I'm glad Trump is outta there and I wish certain supporters would follow him. But I never bought into the joke that Jon Stewart made before the 2016 election; that we could either vote for Hillary to be the next president or Trump to be the last president.
So read Kevin Drum's piece and if you like what you see there, read this one from a week or so ago. He took on a right-winger who listed things that were going horribly wrong in this country and pointed out with some pretty sound charts and facts that most of those problems weren't problems…or at least weren't huge problems.