TRUMP HORROR SHOW HAS US MISSING THE
At the beginning of every apocalyptic thriller, there’s always a scene where the hero is getting ready for work, feeding the kids breakfast, dealing with a dog that has barfed in the living room and generally dealing with the million minor stresses of everyday life.
Meanwhile, on the TV or radio in the background, the news is cycling through the usual mundanities of petty crime and traffic and local weather, except thrown into the mix there are always a handful of Easter eggs: warnings of nuclear sabre-rattling by jumped-up third-world dictators; quirky reports of bizarre weather patterns in Europe; a fun little hit about a couple from the Midwest who swore they saw an alien spacecraft collecting samples in a field behind their house.
These scenes help set up the narrative in three ways. First, they establish the family ties that will provide the emotional basis for the film. Second, they foreshadow the crisis to come that will drive the plot. But most importantly, these movies always have the lone scientist or researcher who knows what is going on, but who is dismissed by everyone as crazy or conspiracy minded.
Their job is to both flatter the viewer (we know what’s coming) but also to warn us: There are patterns out there, in nature, in human affairs, in the cosmos, that we are too busy with our daily lives to notice. And our indifference will lead us to our doom.
I was reminded of these scenes this week, as I watched my social media feeds explode over news of the indictment of President Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and his associate, Rick Gates. And maybe it’s because I’ve been reading a lot of Robin Hanson recently, or maybe it’s because the normally happy contrarian Tyler Cowen seems to have become enormously pessimistic. But I felt, not for the first time, that this real-time obsession with all things Trump is keeping us from noticing the broader patterns that are at work in our lives, and of which Trump is, at best, a mere symptom and, at worst, an irrelevant distraction.
The bigger patterns I think we should be looking at are concentrated in some big areas: Economics, politics, demographics, medicine and the natural world.
On the economics front, I remain convinced that Cowen’s “great stagnation” thesis is both true and profound. We seem to have hit a period of long-term low growth, and it isn’t clear how we’re going to get out of it.
It doesn’t make me any happier to observe that even Cowen seems to have lost the optimism that punctuated his initial statement of the argument.
On politics: More and more people in the West are losing faith in democracy, and it has nothing to do with Donald Trump. The lack of trust in democracy and the growing openness to authoritarian rule, especially among the young, is very disturbing.