The great disconnect
Gallup, the most prestigious polling firm in the United States, recently reported some head-spinning findings:
- Americans’ satisfaction with their own lives has ticked up to 85%, just five points shy of the 2020 record-high point of 90%.
- Americans’ satisfaction with the direction of the country has fallen to 17%, the lowest in a year.
How can this great disparity between Americans’ astronomically high rating of satisfaction with their own lives and their dismal assessment of the direction of the country be explained?
This finding about perceptions concerning the direction of the country is jarring when you consider where the country was when the pandemic was beginning to rage. The economy was sinking fast. Unemployment claims were soaring. There were long lines of cars waiting to get free food at distribution centers all over the country. Economic recovery would be a long and slow process according to the forecasters. Hospitalizations and deaths from Covid-19 were spiking. Medical personnel and facilities were overwhelmed. Most experts thought it could be years before a safe and effective vaccine against Covid-19 could be developed or, in the worst-case scenario, never, as has been the case with AIDS.
Since that time, we have gone from mass unemployment to record job creation and rock-bottom unemployment rates. Last year we had the highest growth in GDP in 40 years. Several safe and effective vaccines have been developed and are available free to anyone who wants it except very young children. For those who are not vaccine-phobic, mired in delusion or paranoid conspiracy theories, or immuno-compromised, Covid is no longer a mortal threat. If this is not going in the right direction, what is?
None of this has happened by chance, so Biden’s steadily diminishing approval ratings is also a source of wonder. Aggressive government policies have been key. The Biden administration and Democrats in Congress passed legislation (the American Rescue Plan) that largely succeeded in jump-starting the economy. The Federal Reserve pumped money into the economy and kept interest rates low. The easing of the pandemic resulting from the administration’s push for vaccination and other public health measures allowed the economy to open and more people to return to work.
The one blemish has been high inflation, but it is not anywhere near the level of hyperinflation experienced a generation ago. The media has hyped inflation to the max, perhaps because it is an easy story to report and perhaps also to provide “balance” to all the good news about employment and growth.
What is seldom, if ever, reported is how hyperinflation was brought down from the peak. It was achieved by crushing the economy and bringing on a job-killing recession. It was brutal and took a long time, like a kind of torture. To their credit the Biden Administration and the Federal Reserve—no liberal body that—have not been willing to wreck the economy and jettison jobs to prevent inflation or, as a Vietnam era saying went, to destroy the village in order to save it.
Part of the reason for the great disconnect must be laid at the feet of the political illiteracy of too many Americans who blame the president for whatever goes wrong, regardless of whether he has any responsibility for it or not. And Biden gets more than most. Why?
Biden has kept many of the promises he made, but he made some unreasonable ones he has not been able to keep, like uniting the American people. Right now that’s mission impossible. But there is something deeper going on that I confess I don’t fully understand.
Perhaps it has to do with the myth of invincibility and innocence that Americans believed for centuries and that Biden’s campaign rhetoric unconsciously fed. Recent history has provided some tough reality checks in the form of defeats in foreign wars and the exposure of atrocious crimes in Vietnam, Iraq, and the war against terrorism. Can you maintain the illusion of innocence after torture committed with impunity?
It may be that to get out of all those traps of our own making Americans wanted to elect a miracle worker but got only a man. At some point in life, a man or a woman comes to lose the youthful sense of being indestructible and to realize that, once lost, that cannot be restored. The same goes for innocence.
Joe Biden, it turned out, is not capable of conferring salvation or absolution, and for that he has been a disappointment for many. Perhaps it is time America grew up and discarded the fantasies of childhood.
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