This is my last column for The New York Timeswhere I began publishing my opinions in January 2000. I am retiring from The Timesnot the world, so I will continue to express my views elsewhere. But this seems like a good occasion to reflect on what has changed in the last 25 years.
What catches my attention, when I look back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest and most resentful people in USA right now, people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the administration Trump incoming, they are billionaires who don’t feel admired enough.
It’s hard to convey how good most Americans felt in 1999 and early 2000. Polls showed a level of satisfaction with the direction of the country that seems surreal by today’s standards. My sense of what happened in the 2000 election was that many Americans took peace and prosperity for granted, so they voted for the guy who seemed the most fun to date.
In Europait also seemed like things were going well. In particular, the introduction of the euro in 1999 was widely hailed as a step towards closer political and economic integration, towards closer United States of Europeif you will. Some of us nasty Americans had doubts, but they were not initially widely shared.
Of course, it wasn’t all puppies and rainbows. There were, for example, already a good number of conspiracy theories like proto-QAnon and even cases of domestic terrorism in USA during the years of Clinton. There were financial crises in Asiawhich some of us saw as a possible harbinger of what was to come; I published a book in 1999 titled “The return of depression economics”, arguing that similar things could happen here; I published a revised edition a decade later, when it was.
Still, people were feeling pretty good about the future when I started writing for this newspaper.
Why did this optimism sour? As I see it, we have had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they are doing, or that we can assume they are being honest.
It wasn’t always like this. In 2002 and 2003, those of us who argued that the case for invading Irak was fundamentally fraudulent, we received a lot of resistance from people who refused to believe that an American president would do such a thing. Who would say that now?
In a different way, the 2008 financial crisis It undermined any faith the public had that governments knew how to manage economies. The euro as a currency survived the European crisis that peaked in 2012, bringing unemployment in some countries to poverty levels. Great Depressionbut trust in Eurocrats—and belief in a bright future for Europa—they didn’t.
It is not just governments that have lost public trust. It’s amazing to look back and see how much more favorably banks were viewed before the financial crisis.
And it’s not long since Tech billionaires were widely admired across the political spectrumsome achieving folk hero status. But now they and some of their products face disappointment and worse; Australia It has even prohibited the use of social networks by minors under 16 years of age.
Which brings me back to my point that some of the most resentful people in USA now they appear to be angry billionaires.
We’ve seen this before. After the 2008 financial crisiswhich was partly rightly attributed to financial trafficking and speculation, you might have expected that the yesteryears Masters of the Universe They would show some contrition, perhaps even gratitude for having been rescued. What we got instead was “anger against Obama”, fury towards the 44th president for even suggesting that Wall Street could have been partly to blame for the disaster.
Today there has been much discussion about the Right turn of some tech billionairesfrom Elon Musk down. I would say that we shouldn’t overanalyze it, and we especially shouldn’t try to say that this is somehow the fault of politically correct liberals. It basically boils down to the pettiness of plutocrats who used to revel in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy them love.
So is there a way out of this dark place we are in? What I believe is that While resentment can put bad people in power, it cannot keep them there in the long run.. At some point, the public will realize that most politicians who speak out against elites are actually elites in every way that matters and will begin to hold them accountable for their failure to keep promises. And at that point, the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.
We may never regain the kind of faith in our leaders—the belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they are doing—that we used to have. Nor should we. But if we face the kakistogracia —government by the worst—that is emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world.
(C) The New York Times.-
