Upswingers and Downswingers

The popular gloom notwithstanding, we’re actually living in an era of astounding progress. We’ve seen the greatest reduction in global poverty in history. As Steven Pinker has documented, we’ve seen a steady decline in wars and armed conflict. The U.S. economy is the best performing major economy in the developed world.

n 1980 the U.S. had a slight edge in G.D.P. per capita over Germany, Japan, France and the U.K. But the U.S. has grown much faster than the other major economies over the past 37 years, so that now it produces about $54,000 of output per capita compared with about $39,000 for Japan and France.

.. During the mid-20th century the West developed a group-oriented culture to deal with the Great Depression and the World Wars. Its motto could have been

“We’re in this together.” That became too conformist and stultifying.

A new individualistic culture emerged (pivot) whose motto could have been

“I’m free to be myself.”

That was great for a time, but excessive individualism has left society

too fragmented, isolated and divided (hatchet). Something new is needed.

.. Politics during the hatchet phase gets nasty. It tends to devolve into a fight between upswingers and downswingers.

Upswingers believe in progress and feel that society is still fitfully moving upward.

Downswingers have lost faith in progress and feel everything is broken.

.. Among Republicans the

upswingers embrace capitalist dynamism, global engagement and the open movement of people and ideas. The

downswingers embrace ethnic and national cohesion and closed borders.

On the left it’s between those who believe

the only realistic path is to reform existing structures and

those who think they are so broken we need to

.. Because of the loss of faith in progress downswingers have a baseline mood of pessimism, protest and anger. They are marked by a deep social distrust and a bent toward conspiracy thinking. They disrespect codes of etiquette that traditionally regulate public life and crack down on opposing speech.

.. downswingers have a tropism toward ethnic and identity politics. If you’ve lost faith in universal progress, if you think everything is a zero-sum scramble for slices of a stagnant or shrinking pie, then of course you are going to see your ethnic identity marker as essential and all defining.

.. You are going to embrace a sense of victimhood