Enduring a year of American disappointment

A year ago last week, Joe Biden was inaugurated as president of a country poised between two possible post-pandemic futures — one more dynamic and one more stagnant, one in which the shock of COVID-19 shoved American society out of our ruts and repetitions and one in which the pandemic only deepened our stagnation.

Today the president is enduring dismal approval ratings in large part because the stagnant future is winning. The dynamic scenarios have been postponed or blocked or disappointed, while the grimmer possibilities have increasingly dominated our reality. If 2020 was a year of crisis that seemed to open into a more hopeful American future, 2021 was a year of closed doors, downward tugs and disappointment.

The hopes for dynamism a year ago started with the fact that we had come through the worst of the pandemic without a severe recession, and the American economy kept absorbing new infusions of cash without worrisome inflation.

This suggested that there was room for an ambitious liberal agenda that basically built on the Trump-era economic expansion — rejecting austerity and using loose money and deficit spending to sustain solid growth and low unemployment deep into the 2020s.

All those economic hopes depended on vaccines whose effectiveness at the time looked somewhere between impressive and amazing. But the vaccines were also treated as a proof-of-concept for an age of renewed innovation, which it was hoped the COVID-19 experience would accelerate — with mRNA vaccines just one of a longer list of wonders, from new energy tech to new forms of transportation, from life extension to space exploration.

And along with those hopes there was also hope for dramatic social shifts. Last June tech baron Marc Andreessen, whose widely circulated essay “It’s Time to Build” lamented American sclerosis early in the pandemic, wrote a much more bullish piece celebrating the success of technology — from vaccines to Zoom meetings — in the battle against COVID-19. He placed a particular stress on the success of remote work, hailing it as “permanent civilizational shift” with the potential to shatter geographical concentrations of power.

But the optimistic Andreessen essay was published just as the delta variant began spreading around the United States in earnest, and since then, the dynamism scenario has taken a beating.

First came the rise in inflation, which reduced the free-lunch opportunities that seemed to be available last spring. With that disappointment has come political disappointment for Democrats, who briefly imagined themselves building a new majority while presiding over a 2020s boom, and instead seemed poised for a big reversion, a swift return to the gridlock that has characterized American politics throughout our long era of stagnation.

Then there is the disappointment of the vaccines. They are a lifesaving weapon, but medically they have also fallen well short of initial hopes: Their strongest protection fades fast, they require boosters at a pace that makes near-universal uptake unimaginable, and they haven’t reduced transmission enough to actually crush COVID-19.

And there isn’t even clear evidence yet for the possible social upside of remote work, the hope that the professional class will be scattered geographically and our political self-segregation will diminish.

I want to believe in this great-dispersal theory, and clearly some people have fled our overpriced megalopolises to raise their kids in small cities and rural splendor, or just moved to Florida or Texas from California or the Northeast. But the preliminary migration data, up to March 2021, mostly suggests a worsening of American immobility. The decadeslong decline in people moving within the United States, itself a symptom of our general stagnation, only deepened under COVID-19 conditions. Fewer people left cities and fewer people left suburbs relative to the pre-pandemic period, suggesting that rather than introducing a new geographic dynamism, a remote-work version of the frontier spirit, mostly the crisis just froze the social order.

Of course all of this is just a snapshot, and a particularly grim midwinter’s one at that. What was uncertain a year ago about life after the pandemic remains highly provisional today. Most of the prophesied technological innovations still look like possibilities. We don’t know where endemic COVID-19 will settle, and the relative mildness of omicron offers hope that its permanent presence will be more an irritation than an open wound. The great dispersal might already be happening among elites, in numbers too small to meaningfully affect the aggregate, but with beneficial consequences over years and decades for society as a whole. The Republicans might be handed a sweeping majority in 2022 and 2024 and find their own way to governing success. (Don’t laugh.)

Overall, the best hope at the moment is that 2021 will be remembered as a year of unhappy and partial stabilization.