Those are real and serious problems (and not close to an exhaustive list). But the tenor of the public debate—from elected officials to pundits, journalists to public intellectuals—implies that we are living in something approaching the apocalypse. To them, the game is rigged, the system is broken, everything is awful, and life was better decades ago.
That’s mostly bullshit.
If that doesn’t sound like what you’re reading in the newspaper, remember that the news business relies on outraging you.
How many viral social media posts essentially say “all is pretty, pretty good, so let’s just move along”? Of course, just saying “pretty, pretty good” quotes a man who thinks dinner with Hitler and dinner with Trump are six of one half, a sieg heil of another. That kind of poor reality testing is kind of the theme of this essay.
The incentives of the press fuel the narrative of despair and doom. So do the incentives facing politicians, who don’t get gigs by telling you: “Things are mostly okay, but hey, there are some things we really need to work on.”
All of this doomsaying feeds into the populist moment we are living in. And it comes from both sides.
Horseshoe theory is the idea that the far left and the far right converge toward each other, even if they’d both vigorously deny it. Populism, as practiced by both the left and right ends of the horseshoe, has never just been about telling people popular things, such as “ice cream is delicious.” Rather, it’s telling people: “Ice cream is delicious, and you aren’t getting your fair share of the ice cream because you are a helpless victim living in a rigged ice-cream system, and here are the people responsible that we will take to task for you, and by doing so restore your rightful ice cream.”
That was more or less the sales pitch of the populist of the moment: socialist Zohran Mamdani, who clinched the Democratic nomination in the New York City mayor’s race by arguing the city needed revolutionary change. And, with some names changed, it’s a huge part of the MAGA pitch, too.
Populism pits “the people” against “the elites.” It requires the finger-point and the class conflict. And it requires things to be very bad, or else there’s not much for the populist leader to fix.
It is also about zero-sum grievance. It’s about telling people they are getting the shaft and our side is the one to unshaft you, extracting vengeance for you along the way. It’s inherently anti-republican (small r), replacing constitutional, individual, and minority protections and rights with the will of the 51 percent (often fewer are needed) who you can convince about your “populist” revanchist policies that will undo all real or imagined past wrongs done to them.
Now, there is nothing wrong with a good grievance—that is, if the grievance is justified and the solution to the grievance reasonable. The left can justifiably point to Americans without health insurance. The right can justifiably point to a border that was consciously left open for many years. Examples abound.
But today, both the progressive left and the MAGA right seem to run on imaginary—or at best, horribly exaggerated—grievance. The uniting theme is that the average American has it terrible these days, and only their chosen end of the horseshoe can fix it. People will go to extremes only when they are convinced things are terrible—and there’s a cottage industry, again both press and politicians, working on selling that story.
The left blames rich people and corporations. (We have to redistribute your ice cream from them back to you.) The right blames free trade, immigrants —including legal ones, who came here just to take your ice cream—and, uh, also rich people and corporations. Actually, the populist, progressive left and the populist, MAGA right agree on a lot (straight from the horseshoe’s mouth). Both are hostile to big business, tech companies (with the exception of crypto for MAGA, at least for now), fiscal responsibility and entitlement reform, global supply chains, experts, free trade, taxing tipped income, non-organized labor, and free markets. At the extremes, they both scapegoat Jews, the far right often using placeholder words like globalist, the far left preferring words like Zionist, though increasingly just going to full-on Jew-blaming (stay classy, James).
Both ends of the horseshoe advocate intrusive, autocratic socialistic government, either de facto (the MAGA right who won’t use the word socialist but nonetheless push for more government control of the economy) or de jure (the progressive left, definitely including Mamdani, often will use the s-word, usually but not always prefaced with the adjective democratic)—such unchecked state power being the necessary tool to fix what is broken and even the score.
There has never been a better time and place to be alive than in the United States today.
The thing that unites them is their claim that the average American is living through a catastrophe that only they can fix. Despite the popularity of this view, it just isn’t true. But, sadly, telling people they’re being screwed by some remote “other” seems to be a winning strategy—at least for a while.
Put simply, it’s just the opposite. We are living in the best world ever for the most people ever. Lots of things are bad; lots of things can be made better. “Best world ever” does not mean “perfect world.” But if the progressive left tells you the 1950s were better, as labor unions were stronger and tax rates were over 90 percent, and the MAGA right tells you the 1950s were better, as labor unions were stronger and Harriet was still a tradwife to Ozzie, both are just wrong.
Our politics today would look a lot different and a lot better if we started from the undeniable reality of today’s extreme broad-based prosperity and human flourishing—and then tried to make it even broader and even better.
So let’s start with the facts:
There has never been a better time and place to be alive than in the United States today. We will focus on economics below, as that is our expertise, and easily the single biggest category of populist grievance.
by Clifford S. Asness and Michael R. Strain, Free Press | Read more:
Image: Ernst Haas/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
[ed. Just a reminder, interesting and informed perspectives are always welcomed here whether we agree with them or not.]
[ed. Just a reminder, interesting and informed perspectives are always welcomed here whether we agree with them or not.]
