David Brooks is an estimable columnist who can regularly be read in the New York Times. A few days ago, he penned a piece titled, “Why Biden Isn’t Getting the Credit He Deserves.” Brooks pointed out that by most measures the American economy is thriving and that the policies of President Joe Biden deserve much if not most of the credit. But, while “Americans should be celebrating,” Brooks wrote, most are not. Instead of acknowlednig the country’s successes 74 percent of the American people say it’s on the wrong track. And instead of acknowledging the president’s sucssesses his approval ratings have been stuck for a year at a “perilously low” 43 percent.
Brooks asks why this is. Why the American people are so reluctant to take pleasure in their good fortune and to give credit where credit is due. Partly, he writes, it’s because of inflation – a few key prices are obviously higher than they were three years ago. And partly it’s the media – now in the habit of stoking anger and fear. But in the main, Brooks writes, the problem is our “national psychology.” He concludes that during “the Trump era we have suffered a collective moral injury and a collective loss of confidence, a loss of faith in ourselves as a nation.”
Far be it from me to argue that since Donald Trump entered politics in 2015, our discourse has been increasingly debased and our disposition increasingly depressed. But to blame a single individual for what’s gone wrong is both antihistorical and devoid of contextual consciousness.
The Trajectory of History
That followers in liberal democracies should criticize and even condemn their leaders is entirely in keeping with what has been, at least since the Enlightenment, the historical trend. Patterns of dominance and deference change over time: in the West they have in the last several centuries, and even in the last several decades, resulted in leaders who are weaker and followers who are stronger.
While this trend ebbs and flows in fits and starts, overall, it’s unmistakable. As I wrote in The End of Leadership, “there is less respect for authority across the board [than there used to be] – in government and business, in the academy and in the professions, even in religion. Power and influence have continued to devolve from the top down – those at the top having less power and influence; those in the middle and at the bottom having more. For their part, followers, ordinary people, have an [ever] expanding sense of entitlement – demanding more and giving less.”*
There are two primary reasons for this shift. The first are changes in technology, beginning at least with the printing press and ending (for the moment) with social media. The second are changes in culture, in which those without authority have increasingly less compunction about taking on those with.
The Consequence of Context
Brooks ignores an inconvenient truth: that what’s happening in the United States is not unique to the United States. Other liberal democracies are suffering the same crisis of faith – faith that their democratic system of government can deliver what it seems on the surface to promise. Not only the pursuit of happiness but happiness itself.
France has been riven with strife off and on for years, most dramatically this year. First, for months on end the country was racked with large and deeply disruptive protests over President Emmanuel Macron’s determination to push through pension reform. Now, in the last week, have been riots in the streets, looting and burning in cities and suburbs in response to the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old of Algerian descent. At this writing have been six nights of extreme unrest, to which some 45,000 police and gendarmes have been summoned to respond.
A week ago, in Germany, was the first ever electoral victory at the district level of a member of the far-right populist party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Now, seven days later, was the first ever electoral victory of the AfD at the mayoral level. No one is suggesting the AfD poses a serious threat to the centrist government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Still, the 10-year-old party has been polling up to 20% in recent surveys. Additionally, the AfD is now considered a durable force in German politics, reflecting widespread divisiveness over, especially though not exclusively, the issue of immigration.
Rishi Sunak is the latest in an impressive series of British Prime Ministers – remember Liz Truss? – whose brief tenures have been riven with division and disapproval. Dissatisfaction with the government continues to increase – it’s now at record levels with approximately 80% of Britons registering chronic dissatisfaction. Additionally, the British electorate is suffering from a severe and so far, incurable case of buyer’s remorse. They deeply regret their monumental decision to opt for Brexit, to quit the European Union, with four out of five Britons now saying they want closer ties to Europe.
Then there is Israel, touted for over a half century as the only democracy in the Middle East and as America’s only reliable ally in the region. Now where is it? Now Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is on trial, defending himself against charges including fraud, bribery, and breach of trust. Now Israel is being sundered by Netanyahu’s attempt massively to overhaul the country’s judicial system. And now there is a serious split in Israeli’s right-wing government over how hard, if at all, to crack down on Jewish extremists, especially settlers who attack Palestinian villages. The long-touted so-called two-state solution seems dead as the proverbial doornail – an impression reinforced again today, when Israel launched its biggest airstrike on an area in the West Bank in two decades. This leaves the one-state solution which is, so far as anyone can now tell, no solution at all.
On this July 4th weekend then the United States is by no means alone. Whatever it is that ails the American people is not a disease for which any single individual is responsible. Rather it reflects the temper of the times in which democracy itself gives us not only permission to want more – but to demand more than what we already have.
——————————————
*HarperCollins, 2012, pp. xviii-xix.