Weekly: Perfect Storm, Imperfect Union Revisited

In December of 2023, I published a piece called “Perfect Storm, Imperfect Union.”

Technically, it was one of my Monthly Letters to subscribers, but it didn’t (and still doesn’t) read like one. There are no autobiographical vignettes and it wasn’t written with a mind towards producing a new masterpiece of in-group literary memorabilia.

In that regard, “Perfect Storm” might’ve disappointed some of the die hard fans among you. If I remember correctly, I was a little disappointed in it myself, being my own biggest fan.

Although “Perfect Storm” isn’t going to make anyone’s top five list of Heisenberg Report Monthly Letters, it’s quite good as a piece of US-focused socioeconomic analysis. I was reminded of that on Saturday morning while perusing a Wall Street Journal article about the US government shutdown.

In that linked piece, the Journal explains why this shutdown feels different than past funding lapses. The title of their article is “Shutdown Lays Bare America’s Latest Crisis: A Total Breakdown in Trust.” The deck notes that “Past shutdowns have been about one thing” whereas “this one feels like it is about everything.” (Emphasis mine.)

I do encourage you to read the Journal‘s account, because it’s good. But first, I implore you to re-read (or, if you’re new here, read for the first time) “Perfect Storm.” It’s re-printed below with the charts updated. At the risk of overstating the case (and indulging my penchant for self-celebration vis-à-vis the work I do), “Perfect Storm” is what the Journal‘s shutdown account would be if the Journal had anyone on staff capable of wielding a digital pen with the same level of adroitness as yours truly.

Perfect Storm, Imperfect Union: Redux

 

“I think that over the past few years, Americans have been feeling increasingly insecure about all sorts of things,” historian Geraldo Cadava told The New Yorker‘s Political Scene podcast late in November of 2023. “You can chalk it up to the pandemic. You can chalk it up to climate change. Any number of things are making a lot of us anxious and insecure and that can be a destabilizing feeling.”

A Yale PhD who teaches at Northwestern, Cadava writes on the Latino experience in the United States. He’s the author of The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of An American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump, and contributes to The Journal of American History, The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe.

Cadava’s assessment of Americans’ mindset came in response to a question from the The New Yorker‘s Tyler Foggatt who asked why Latinos, who traditionally vote Democrat, are defecting to the GOP. “Maybe this is going to strike you as a little too much of a psychological explanation,” Cadava ventured, before describing the prevailing sense of angst in America. “We love psychological explanations,” Foggatt interjected, laughing.

I’m a voracious consumer of podcasts. That might surprise some readers given my insistence on the idea that when it comes to acquiring knowledge, there’s no substitute for physical books and magazines. I like podcasts because you can play them throughout the day, in the background, like you might classical music, and absorb incremental information through a kind of osmosis. I probably go through five or six podcast episodes every day while writing other things. Most of it’s just noise, but every so often I’ll hear something interesting and jot it down so I can come back to it later.

Cadava’s chat with Foggatt was about Donald Trump’s (often counterintuitive) appeal with Latino voters, but it was his off-the-cuff diagnosis of America’s rattled psyche (barely three minutes into the half-hour discussion), that struck me. Cadava seemed to date the trauma to recent events, and it’s certainly true that the last several years were psychologically taxing. But I think it goes back further.

I’ve talked at length about the specifics of social dissolution in America (a process that began decades ago) and the country’s worsening institutional credibility crisis, which now encompasses every branch of government (as well as the bureaucracy and the media). But at a more abstract level, the American consciousness succumbed over the past two decades to a creeping sense of fearful apprehension — a pervasive intuition of foreboding that made it increasingly difficult for the country to conceptualize of itself as apart from the discomposing realities of a profoundly flawed world.

One lesson of the 2020s seems to be that various idealized frameworks for thinking about the past several decades were absurd mischaracterizations. We hadn’t, as it turned out, reached “the end of history.” Humankind didn’t overcome plague and war. While there’s some truth to the idea that all modern famines are man-made (i.e., political choices), the distinction with historical famines attributable to human haplessness is one without a difference to the starving. And, to the extent there was a “great moderation” in the macroeconomic sphere, it was an aberration, not the new normal.

In the context of existential American angst, I wonder if the pandemic, Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest in Ukraine and the 2020s inflation should be thought of as the punctuation mark — an exclamation point — on a process that began with 9/11 and continued with Lehman’s collapse seven years later.

Beginning in the late 1980s, America entered a kind of dream state. To be sure, the onset of shareholder capitalism sowed the seeds of a socioeconomic calamity on Main Street (a slow-burning nightmare), and the early 1990s weren’t a cakewalk, but for over a decade (and particularly in the years leading up to the dot-com crash), many Americans existed in a fantasy world. There’s no greater exemplar of psychological repose than the luxury of taking serious the trivial. And a lot of trivial things were taken quite seriously during that era. The dream began to disintegrate one clear blue Manhattan morning in September of 2001.

A Gallup poll conducted on the 20-year anniversary of 9/11 found nearly two-thirds of US adults believe Americans have “permanently changed the way they live” because of the attacks.

In the same poll, a combined 59% said they were very (18%) or somewhat (41%) confident that the US government is capable of protecting its citizens from terrorism, the second-lowest reading since 9/11, while 22% said the terrorists are winning the “war on terror,” the second-highest reading in the history of the question.

Obviously, how you view the trajectory of American society depends on when you were born. If you’re old enough to remember the 1960s and 1970s, you know recent socioeconomic events aren’t entirely unprecedented. (I remember standing in a long line at the post office sometime in 2021 or early 2022. The thirtysomethings were lost in their smartphones, but an older man groused: “Things are breaking down again.” Again.) On the other side, anyone born in the 90s probably doesn’t appreciate the extent to which their early childhood was spent in a halcyon period.

I should emphasize that the veneer of stability and widespread American prosperity in the mid- to late-90s hid a darker underlying reality. America was in the process of going bankrupt in the social capital department, and many of the deleterious trends documented painstakingly by Anne Case and Angus Deaton in Deaths of Despair began in the 90s. In the latter years of that decade, I had occasion to live in and around lower Appalachia: I saw first-hand the onset of the opioid epidemic.

But generally speaking, the mid- to late-90s is a period we typically associate with “peak America.” Or at least “peak Americana.” 9/11 was a wake up call and a turning point. In the black, acrid smoke billowing from Lower Manhattan, Americans saw dark clouds gathering around their allegorical “shining city on a hill.”

In June of 1992, Gallup polling on Americans’ satisfaction with the way things were going in the country hit the second lowest on record, at just 14% (it was lower in 1979). From there, satisfaction increased steadily, peaking at a record 71% in February of 1999, by which time satisfaction had been 50% or greater in all but one out of 14 surveys conducted over more than two years. Such levels of voter satisfaction with the state of the nation are unimaginable today.

Following a jump to 70 in December of 2001 (presumably on a “rally around the flag” phenomenon), satisfaction trundled ever lower, reaching a listless nadir of just 7% in October of 2008, in the days after Lehman fell. It’s exceeded 40% only two times since then (in January and February of 2020, on the eve of the pandemic).

One of the ironies of the modern, hyper-globalization era was the extent to which prosperous Americans’ sense of exceptionalism morphed into a kind of blissful remoteness — an aloof detachment in an increasingly interconnected world. At the same time, much of America was blind to evidence of domestic disaffection and associated societal corrosion.

The country failed (miserably) to detect and anticipate various forms of blowback ranging from the internal socioeconomic consequences of globalization and no-guardrails capitalism to the boomerang effect of a US foreign policy defined by overreach, misplaced pretensions to ideological and cultural supremacy and generalized arrogance as Henry Kissinger’s brutal Cold War realpolitik (which, while often indefensible on moral grounds, was at least strategic) was replaced by a kind of incoherent, halfwitted hubris (which was both immoral and imbecilic).

In the space of just two decades, everything unraveled. In Pew polling, the share of Americans who say they trust their government to “do what’s right just about always or most of the time” hit a then record low of 17% in 1994. By 2000, that share rose to 44%, jumped to 60% around 9/11, then careened steadily lower to a pitiable 10% in 2011. It’s 20% in 2025.

Pew narrated the history of the polling. “When the National Election Study began asking about trust in government in 1958, about three-quarters of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing almost always or most of the time,” a summary reads. That trust fell apart in the 60s as Vietnam weighed on public opinion. The situation worsened in the 70s around Watergate and the inflation crisis.

Confidence rebounded in the mid-80s, fell again, then recovered in mid-90s, rising steadily alongside a buoyant economy before hitting a three-decade high in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (there again we see the “rally around the flag” phenomenon). After that, the bottom fell out. As Pew noted, the share of Americans who trust the government “always” or “most of the time” hasn’t surpassed 30% since 2007, just before the financial crisis.

The steady (and apparently permanent) erosion of confidence since 9/11, punctuated by the financial crisis, is hardly surprising. The “war on terror” calcified anti-American sentiment across the Arab world, opened the door to the invasion of an unrelated country on false pretenses (which to this day serves the propaganda purposes of America’s adversaries) and will forever stand as a horrifically tragic testament to the many perils of mission creep.

Back at home, the delusional notion that wealth can be conjured from thin air through unfettered financialization on Wall Street collapsed the economy in 2008, and while capitalism (barely) survived, the methods used to resuscitate it sowed the seeds for a future paroxysm as monetary policy inflated the value of financial assets, widening the wealth gap to extremes unseen in a century.

That was insult to injury for a hollowed out middle-class. The extinction of blue collar employment and the perception (true or not) that working class white males were being marginalized in “their own” country, became intertwined with various manifestations of deprivation and associated escapism, including alcoholism and opioid addiction. That demographic became a vulnerable voter bloc amenable to the siren song of populism.

Then came the pandemic, which underscored everyone’s worst fears in one way or another. If you were a conservative, public health protocols were an intolerable encroachment, indicative of government’s natural inclination to overreach. If you were a liberal, push back from conservatives against common sense public health measures and, later, deliberate efforts to undermine the vaccination campaign, were indicative of suicidal ignorance akin to the kind of dangerously backwards thinking that asserts creationism over evolution and denies the reality of climate change.

The social fabric, already stretched to the breaking point after so many decades of civic decline, tore. The streets burned, the Capitol was sacked and although the republic survived, it now stands as a house more divided against itself than at any time since the Civil War. No one trusts anyone. Or anything.

Just about the only thing Americans have more faith in now than they did in the past is banks, and that’s only because the “past” includes the financial crisis, when the banks basically failed.

Just 61% of Americans have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in science, which is tantamount to saying less than two-thirds of the country has confidence in facts. (Americans do still have faith in small businesses, which is somewhat encouraging to the extent it suggests a sense of community pride.)

Consider this: The share of Americans who harbor an unfavorable view of both parties in the country’s political duopoly is now approaching 30%, according to Pew. In 1994, that figure was a mere 6%.

“Many people are open to the idea of having more political parties,” Pew wrote, in 2023, before quickly noting that there’s “considerable skepticism that having more parties would make it easier for the country to solve its problems.” Specifically, only 26% said more parties would make problem-solving easier, not materially different from the share who said more parties would make things worse.

Looking abroad, the situation isn’t any better. Conservatives and liberals both blamed China for the public health crisis. That exacerbated tensions between the world’s two superpowers. For disaffected voters who fell further behind in the decades since China joined to the WTO, the pandemic was the last straw vis-à-vis Beijing.

Blind faith in the many miracles of globalization, including and especially the religion of just-in-time, was exposed as a dangerous delusion when the severing of supply chains drove up inflation across the developed world, a state of affairs Putin exploited when his invasion of Ukraine pushed up the cost of energy and food. Putin’s actions in 2022 proved the West’s strategy of looking the other way as the Kremlin assassinated dissidents on foreign soil and annexed territory was fatally flawed. It’s entirely fair to suggest the Ukraine invasion prolonged America’s worst bout with inflation since the 70s, thereby exacerbating domestic discord, fanning the flames of partisan rancor and undermining faith in the Fed.

The upshot: America’s many domestic and foreign policy failures coalesced in a multi-faceted super crisis in the 2020s. The cumulative effect of missteps and mismanagement overwhelmed the country’s critical faculties, creating a perfect storm defined by acute disorientation, widespread paranoia and a complete lack of trust.

None of this is lost on America’s adversaries around the world. In fact, they work hard to exacerbate the situation whenever and wherever possible. They enjoyed a lot of success in recent years, on the off chance you didn’t notice.

Currently, the world’s staring down several overlapping existential crises, including climate change, the threat of great power wars and mass migrations. In its current enfeebled state, America is in no condition to confront these crises. The country doesn’t even know what it wants to be anymore. Is America a democracy or an autocratic, neo-monarchy? Is it a multicultural pluralistic nation of immigrants still keen to embrace the world’s tired, poor, huddled masses or is it an ethnonationalist state determined to reassert white Christendom through a closed-door immigration policy? Is it a secular state or a theocracy where a majority on a panel of robed judges shapes society based on scripture? Is it socialist, capitalist or a hybrid model? And on and on.

Without some shared sense of identity and purpose that doesn’t itself revolve around contentious issues (you can’t have a multicultural, pluralistic society with a “shared” sense of white, male Christian identity), America won’t even be able to stabilize a still dangerously tempestuous domestic situation, let alone hold itself up as a bastion of stability to a world in desperate need of a lodestar.

Of course, the idea of America as a “guiding light” to the world was always a joke, and not a very funny one for all the people who died during the establishment and maintenance of Pax Americana. One of Kissinger’s signature zingers went like this: “The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

On the home front, the game’s been rigged against everyday citizens for a least four decades, and against African Americans and women for the entire history of the republic. A “perfect union,” America most assuredly isn’t. But if things keep going the way they’re going, it won’t be a union at all.

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