“There’s nothing there for you. You know that, right?”

She was on her second glass of Malbec. I was halfway through a second coffee.

“Yeah.”

It was five-ish, and it was January, so it should’ve been cool, especially with the breeze off the water. But evening suns can be vengeful as they drown in the ocean. And there was no breeze. It wasn’t stifling, but it was intrusive, and I found that presumptuous — on whose part I didn’t know. Nature’s I guess.

Had it been 1992 instead of 2022, we’d have been sitting on a sand dune. What’s now a sprawling patio with a brick fire pit that might’ve walked out of a suburban backyard, was once a charmingly ramshackle boardwalk with a burger counter that was authentically summer. Next to it was a tiki-style bar. That, at least, is still there, but only in spirit. The thatch is visibly synthetic now, and the trio of oversized flatscreens broadcasting today’s news are a reminder of how difficult it is to escape — and how no one really wants to anymore.

“Your old life–” She motioned flippantly with her hand at nothing in particular. The blood orange star tattoo on her right elbow still matched her hair. Neither seemed to have faded with time. “That life’s gone.”

I chafed at that. Not outwardly, but it confirmed an uncomfortable suspicion I’d been harboring for as long as I can remember. The cast of characters who’d play leading roles in a hypothetical film adaptation of the most exciting part of my life moved on long ago. More vexing, they probably didn’t contextualize their lives by way of my story arc in the first place, or at least not nearly as much as I’d imagined.

In many respects, she was my old life. Not in any romantic sense, but in a business sense. If making money were a crime, she was my accomplice. Fortunately for us, by-any-means capitalism isn’t just legal in America, it’s glorified.

She thought I should move to Florida. That’s where she is now, and she likes it. I was entertaining the idea of going back to the movie set. Back to the stage. Back to the city where I was most authentically me, and for the first time since the credits rolled and the curtain closed. To do what, I didn’t know, and still don’t.

In “Exiles On Main Street,” I documented the familiar tale of blue collar decline in America and the slow disintegration of the country’s social capital over the last five decades. The overarching point: Much good was lost during the period we typically associate with peace and prosperity. America struck a number of Faustian bargains in succession during that epoch which together hollowed out the country, leaving a Potemkin village where gleaming skyscrapers and fabulous wealth hid Belle Époque-style inequality built atop modern serfdom in a services sector where the children of yesteryear’s blue collar aristocrats are paid $10 per hour to serve $10 lattes to Thomas Piketty’s “supermanagers.”

The tragic irony of Donald Trump’s brand of populism was twofold. First, he built the gleaming skyscrapers, and personified the era when Main Street’s decline accelerated in earnest. Second, and more importantly, in the course of weaponizing nostalgia, Trumpism made the underlying problem worse. He leveraged what Robert Putnam called “bonding social capital” to the detriment of societal cohesion. It was the loss of cohesion — the fraying of the social fabric and the extinction of the civic-minded American — which opened the door for Trumpism in the first place.

Putnam, writing in 2000, recognized the risk. “Negative manifestations” of social capital, he wrote, include “sectarianism and ethnocentrism.” Bonding social capital (as distinct from “bridging” social capital) is exclusive (versus inclusive), and although that needn’t be nefarious, Putnam readily conceded that “by creating strong in-group loyalty,” bonding social capital “may also create strong out-group antagonism.”

And so it did, to the point that nostalgia for the era of strong communities, civic engagement, union membership and a generalized sense of belonging and cohesiveness, became synonymous with racism, xenophobia and generalized intolerance.

That speaks to the tension inherent in American socioeconomic discourse. The country has, in many respects, lost its way. But on the way to getting lost, much was found. America is nowhere near being the land of equal opportunity, and you could certainly argue that discrimination (against women and minorities, for example) is nearly as pervasive today as it was a half-century ago, it’s just less overt. It’d be a stretch, though, to suggest that no progress at all has been made, and it’d be ludicrous to suggest that America in 2023 is somehow a less liberal society than it was in 1960. Indeed, part and parcel of the toxic nostalgia that defines today’s partisan rancor is the idea that the country has made too much progress in that regard, such that “woke” politics has become a caricature of its well-meaning self.

Disaffection with the present and uncertainty about the future tempt us to glorify the past, sometimes justifiably, other times not, but in many cases, the stories we tell are shaped by what we want to believe about ourselves rather than by a full understanding of events, their meaning and the lessons they taught.

As Masha Gessen prophetically wrote in 2019, “as the politics of isolationism, nostalgia and resentment have claimed electoral victories throughout the Western world,” the stories “nations devised about themselves in the aftermath of [the Second World War] have started falling apart.” “People who actually remember the conflict are nearly all gone [and] their story is being reframed, with breathtaking speed, as one of glory, or at least of warring armies, rather than as a story of humanity’s darkest hour so far,” Gessen said. “Instead of serving as a warning, the Second World War is becoming the source of nostalgia for greatness.”

There was, of course, much that was historically grand and unequivocally noble about the Allied cause, just as there was indeed something “great” about the golden era of American community and camaraderie, exemplified by a more or less unitary sense of national purpose and idealized in the (somewhat apocryphal) Polaroid-perfect nuclear family.

But, as Gessen put it, the story of the Second World War isn’t first and foremost the tale of an epic, real-life game of Risk. It’s the story of the Holocaust, the bomb and, more broadly, of humanity learning about its own capacity for cruelty and destruction on a theretofore unimaginable scale. To reframe it, inadvertently or intentionally, is its own crime against humanity.

Increasingly, the stories Americans tell themselves about the nation’s history are tales of slow decline, where successive generations are less “great,” and society the worse for it. That’s the foundation upon which populist nostalgia politics is built, and in an economic sense, there’s a lot of truth to the narrative.

In February’s monthly letter, I described how economic shifts and the rise of shareholder capitalism went hand in hand with the decline of blue collar America and eventually relegated the majority of the country to menial work in a services industry that loosely resembles serfdom. That created an ocean of rage capital just waiting to be tapped by opportunistic politicians promising to reverse decades of economic and social decline on the way to recreating the past.

As it turns out, though, American history isn’t first and foremost the tale of a republic striving, let alone succeeding, to live up to lofty ideals espoused by men (tellingly, all men) who everywhere and always practiced what they preached. And the era we often recall in romanticized tales of lost greatness was an era characterized by pervasive race- and gender-based discrimination the likes of which would be cause for immediate disciplinary action, and in some cases legal proceedings, in virtually all professional settings just a half-century later.

The “Polaroid-perfect” nuclear families I mentioned above were infallibly white, as were the idyllic neighborhoods and communities immortalized in advertising campaigns and sitcoms, while corporate America was comprised almost exclusively of white males even the most enlightened of whom regularly trafficked in what, today, would be considered comically uncouth misogynistic tropes. Modern notions of “gender roles” hadn’t even occurred to most people yet. Back then, a dispute over “gender roles” meant an argument over who “should” do the laundry, not a debate about pronouns.

We’ve come a long way from that state of affairs and make no mistake: We don’t want to go back. When we tell the story of a country that’s lost its way, and when we traffic in nostalgic laments for the era just prior to the onset of so many deleterious socioeconomic trends, we can’t forget the real lessons of the struggle for equal rights. That is, we should be careful not to inadvertently lose track of the fact that America in the mid-20th century was a profoundly unequal society, still wholly incongruous with the high-minded rhetoric the nation’s Founders (a proper noun in the US) employed in the republic’s founding documents.

Indeed, the only sense in which African Americans and women were better off in terms of equality midway through the 20th century was by comparison to the overtly heinous state of affairs that existed a century previous, when the former were held as property and the latter as something a lot like property, only without an actual market (generally speaking, you couldn’t sell your wife in the 1800s, and if she ran away of her own volition, the rest of the neighborhood might well form a search party, but it probably wouldn’t involve torches, guns and bloodhounds).

The tragic irony — the vexing paradox — is that the arc of social progress in America overlaps the path of societal disintegration and economic decline on Main Street. That disintegration and decline was experienced acutely by white males who, by now, aren’t especially interested in understanding the nuance of their plight. It’s easier to blame your own losses on other’s gains than it is to reflect on the complex interplay of dynamics behind socioeconomic shifts. That makes fertile ground for populism, which typically promises quick fixes to oversimplified problems. For example, Trump didn’t exactly go out of his way to dispense with accusations that his “great again” mantra was tantamount to pledging the restoration of a race- and gender-based caste system modeled loosely on mid-20th century America.

A few weeks ago, I came across an acerbic post penned by a right-wing provocateur irritated by Claudia Sahm’s contention that the economics profession benefits from diversity. Debating whether a diverse group of economists is any better at forecasting macroeconomic outcomes than a room full of white men misses the point. No one is very good at reliably forecasting macroeconomic outcomes, because economics isn’t a hard science — it’s a soft science that’s been endlessly mathematized to mixed results.

If we conceptualize of economics as a field of study which, when practiced with humility, can assist policymakers (about the most we can claim for it) we don’t need “evidence” for the notion that diversity is beneficial. It’s self-evident that heterogeneity is beneficial when you’re making policy, writing laws, interpreting legal precedent or selling products in a pluralistic society. Just like it’d be self-evident that homogeneity would be beneficial if you were doing the same things in a society comprised entirely of people who looked, acted and thought the exact same way.

You don’t need to be any semblance of “woke” to grasp that simple concept. If we’re selling apparel to women, it helps to have women in the board room. Focus groups aren’t a substitute. If we’re making monetary policy for everybody, not just rich white men with large stock portfolios, it helps if there are some middle-class women and people of color around to speak up during policy deliberations. “Fed listens” events aren’t a substitute. If we’re interpreting a foundational legal document and the decisions we make are binding on a society that looks nothing like it did when the document was written, I helps to have authoritative input from an African American woman, lest our (possibly misplaced) reverence for the misogynistic slaveholders who wrote the document should lead us astray. Amicus briefs aren’t a substitute. If we’re making laws for a society where less than 60% is counted as “White, not Hispanic or Latino,” it helps if the composition of the legislature is roughly aligned with the composition of the body politic for whom the laws are being written. And so on.

Failing to come to terms with that common sense assessment has, and will, lead to suboptimal business decisions, suboptimal policymaking, suboptimal legal rulings and suboptimal lawmaking. It couldn’t possibly be otherwise. It’s not “woke,” it’s just common sense.

On that score, America has made a lot of progress. Most obviously, Barack Obama was president, and the country (finally) has an African American woman on the Supreme Court. The corporate ranks include more women, and according to Moody’s, there may be a connection between gender-balance in the board room and credit worthiness. (I realize that could be a specious claim. I included it for context.)

Of course, things are far from equal. According to McKinsey & Company’s “Women in the Workplace” report, the largest study on the state of women in corporate America, women are still “dramatically underrepresented” in top leadership roles. For example, just one in four C-suite seats are occupied by women and only one in 20 by women of color. Although the gender pay gap narrowed dramatically from the early 1980s through the end of the 20th century, that’s where the progress stopped — it’s been stuck 20% below parity for 20 straight years, according to the Pew Research Center.

As Carolina Aragão wrote for Pew this month, “even though women have increased their presence in higher-paying jobs traditionally dominated by men, such as professional and managerial positions, women as a whole continue to be overrepresented in lower-paying occupations relative to their share of the workforce.” When you break the numbers down by race and ethnicity, African American women earn just 70 cents for every dollar a white male earns, and Hispanic women just 65 cents.

As you can imagine, explanations for the gender pay gap are skewed by partisan affiliation, and also by gender itself. Generally speaking, Democrats suggest employers treat women differently, while Republicans are more inclined to blame women themselves, citing “choices” they make about how to balance family and work, and also their supposed inclination to accept lower-paying jobs. Unsurprisingly, just 18% of Republican males cited unequal treatment in explaining the gender wage gap in the Pew analysis. (I should note that it isn’t only Republican males who question the validity of simplified explanations for the pay gap.)

The idea, then, that white males in America have somehow lost their privileged status is dubious. Things are still unequal, just less so than before. That notion — the idea of lost status for white males — is inextricably bound up with poisonous nostalgia politics in the US. Laying the blame for the readily observable malaise among middle-class white men (who are, in fact, suffering from a veritable epidemic of depression and despair) at the feet of women and minorities is to deliberately oversimplify a highly complex phenomenon.

While you could plausibly make the claim that US manufacturing jobs lost to globalization represent losses incurred at the hands of “foreigners,” xenophobic scapegoating ignores the corporate executives who outsourced the jobs in the first place in the pursuit of better margins and higher profits. Seen in that light, the jobs which once formed the backbone of prosperous blue collar communities weren’t “stolen” away from white men in America by workers in China and India. Rather, they were given away by corporate management — so, given away by other white men.

One might fairly ask whether globalization would’ve meant the wholesale hollowing out of so many American communities if board rooms were more diverse. It’s reasonable to suggest that a room full of executives who were historically marginalized based on gender, race and ethnicity would’ve been highly sensitive to the societal ramifications of outsourcing labor.

Nevertheless, there is something going on. And, as mentioned above, it’s a bit of a Venn diagram. Civic disintegration, socioeconomic decline on Main Street and poisonous identity politics overlap such that attempts to address the real problems risk stumbling into the echo chamber of misogyny, racism and xenophobia. As Idrees Kahloon recently wrote, while reviewing Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, by British-American scholar Richard Reeves,

Many social scientists agree that contemporary American men are mired in malaise, even as they disagree about the causes. Men are increasingly dropping out of work during their prime working years, overdosing, drinking themselves to death and generally dying earlier, including by suicide. And men are powering the new brand of reactionary Republican politics, premised on a return to better times, when America was great — and, unsubtly, when men could really be men. The question is what to make of the paroxysm. For the revanchist right, the plight of American men is existential. It is an affront to biological (and perhaps Biblical) determinism, a threat to an entire social order. Yet, for all the strides that women have made since gaining the right to vote, the highest echelons of power remain lopsidedly male. The detoxification of masculinity, progressives say, is a messy and necessary process; sore losers of undeserved privilege don’t merit much sympathy.

Note that Deaths Of Despair, a volume I’ve cited frequently, including on a number of occasions in February’s monthly letter, is primarily the story of white male decline in America.

In Reeves’s telling, males are staring at the uncomfortable prospect of “cultural redundancy,” brought about in part by what Kahloon aptly described as a “labor-market shift toward brains and away from brawn.” But it’s not confined to white males. African American men are, of course, burdened with a profoundly discriminatory justice system in America. And then there’s the well-documented impact of under-education at a time when good-paying jobs for those without a college education are going extinct.

Regardless of how we approach all of this, we’re confronted with the paradox of how to fix what’s broken without regressing as a society. Take dwindling job opportunities for the under-educated, for example. There’s something to the idea that anyone willing to work, and especially those willing to work hard, should have an opportunity to do so. Not only that, we might insist they should have a real shot at upward mobility. But that can’t mean deemphasizing education, because although ignorance may be bliss, it’s also dangerous. Those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, and because nostalgia politics in America explicitly aims to recreate the past, it makes sense that many of today’s right-wing demagogues are engaged in an effort to downgrade education, rewrite American history or both.

Note that men’s share of college enrollment is down 20 percentage points since 1970. If political opportunists on the right continue to denigrate a college education without delivering on the promise to provide good jobs for those without a bachelor’s degree, the plight of men will worsen, as will their penchant for misogyny, commensurate with the perceived loss of economic standing. The current trend suggests that soon enough, two women will earn a degree for every degree earned by a man.

At every possible turn, the narratives intersect, presenting conundrums aplenty. Consider another example. The progress made on closing the gender pay gap is in part attributable to the much maligned stagnation of real wage growth for men, which is itself a function of offshoring, globalization and the prioritization of investors above all other corporate stakeholders. As Kahloon put it, “good things can also come about for bad reasons.”

Last month, I mentioned Adrift, Scott Galloway’s visual tour of America at a crossroads. In it, Galloway uses statistics from the CDC, Pew, a peer-reviewed psychiatry journal, Brookings and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, to show that America’s “created equal” promise is “broken at birth” for both males and females. Girls are three times more likely to experience abuse and to inflict self-harm, and twice as likely to be passed over for a promotion. Males, on the other hand, are less likely to graduate college, twice as likely to overdose, three and half times as likely to commit suicide and nine times as likely to go to jail.

As Galloway put it, females “face threats from men and from a media that exploits their fears and insecurities” as girls and then, as women, “they enter a working world where the deck is stacked against them.” Threats to males are becoming “more ominous” by the year, he went on, noting that boys are haunted by deaths of despair and increasingly “ill-prepared” for modernity by “a culture that mistakes braggadocio for masculinity and aggression for strength.”

In many ways, America is indeed “adrift,” as Galloway described the nation’s plight. The country is suddenly reckoning with the scope of what was lost over the past half-century, and weighing it against what was gained. There’s no objective answer to the underlying question: “Was it worth it?”

For scores of disaffected white males, the answer is emphatically “No.” For many women, and for fewer minorities, the answer is “Yes,” with caveats to account for lots of unfinished business. But for tens of millions of Americans who are still disenfranchised in one way or another, the answer is “Was what worth it?” For the most disadvantaged, and for those subjected to systematic discrimination, all that’s changed since the country’s “golden” years is the nature of that discrimination — it’s less overt, but no less pervasive and certainly no less pernicious.

That leads us inescapably to a depressingly familiar conclusion. As a percentage of the population, the number of people for whom the answer to the question posed above is unequivocally and resoundingly “Yes!”, is vanishingly small. And you can take “vanishingly” figuratively or quite literally. The dynamics behind wealth creation in America are exponential such that the economic benefits of society are accruing to a smaller and smaller cohort.

There are no simple solutions to the country’s myriad overlapping problems, which is why so many are drawn to the quick fixes offered by right-wing populism, which relies heavily on nostalgia politics. But defining ourselves by a whitewashed version of a bygone era is to deliberately unlearn what we eventually came to understand as the lessons that era taught. Indeed, a tangential side project of nostalgia politics in America goes even further by downplaying the role of forced labor in the nation’s founding, as part of a highly disconcerting bid to make revisionist history the official narrative.

When you’re lost at sea — “adrift” — it may be tempting to pine for your departure port, particularly if you come to believe that everything you’ve gained in terms of character, integrity and perseverance on the journey is somehow not sufficient to compensate for the perils, misfortunes and injustices you endured along the way. But more often than not, it’s best to press on. There was a reason you left in the first place, after all, and if you’ve been gone a long time, there’s likely nothing there for you if you go back.

Last week, workers demolished a favorite old haunt of mine. It was an Italian restaurant owned by the same family since 1987. The husband and wife who managed it in the 80s still managed it right up until it closed its doors during the pandemic.

I met her there when she was just 20 years old. I was young then too. “Remember this place?” She pulled out her phone and showed me a picture someone took of her in 2020, posing next to the iconic sign, an ivy-encircled, old-fashioned marquee letter board that touted the nightly specials.

“What were you doing…?” She cut me off. “I was up there for a wedding.” “During COVID?” She stared at me blankly. I reminded myself she wasn’t vaccinated. Our views on the pandemic clearly didn’t align. I didn’t push the issue.

There used to be a bar across the street called, appropriately, “Side Street.” She worked there for a time. Now it’s an upscale home furnishings shop surrounded by similarly pretentious nods to gentrification, including a coffee roaster where, in December, I sat down with Dominique, a firecracker-of-a-twentysomething who’d just taken me on a tour of overpriced local properties.

“The first thing I tell people is that I’m proud of my city,” she said, for at least the third time that day. She was talking loud enough that the people sitting across the room from us glanced over.

“Yeah, I lived…” “I got my carryin’ permit and everything.” Everybody interrupts me, which I accept as in-person comeuppance for the thousands of people who let me go on uninterrupted in these pages every day.

“Oh yeah?” That she hadn’t told me. “Yeah, you just never know when you’re out showin’ properties to people you never met. Some of ’em’s liberals too.”

We’d been to two homes and two lofts that day, and never once did she ask if I’d been to the area before. She clearly thought I was out-of-town money, instead of a returning anti-hero hoping to script an unnecessary sequel to a drama that exists mostly in my imagination.

If I was “liberal” out-of-town money, she was obviously willing to lose a sale rather than chance another unwelcome intrusion by wealthy Democrats buying up what, by California and New York standards anyway, looks like “cheap” real estate.

She was a walking, talking example of Putnam’s “bonding social capital” — intensely interested in local community to the exclusion of perceived “outsiders,” who might pose some kind of threat. I didn’t take the bait. I wasn’t about to get into a political discussion with someone I’d only met six hours earlier.

As she went on (and on), I looked out the window at the home furnishings shop, where the bar used to be. And out further, where the sign from the Italian restaurant was still standing for what turned out to be just a few more months.

“So, what do you think?” she asked. She was checking her eye makeup using her iPhone camera. “Does it feel like home?”

---