This is an article from the latest issue of Linkiesta Magazine + New York Times Turning Points 2022 on newsstands in Milan and Rome and can be ordered here.
What is the mood in America in 2022? Very bad, if you look at the crisis factors of this society, unable to restore the magical balance of the late twentieth century. Let’s start with the White House: the silent Joe Biden is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. His popularity is in free fall. Mind you: being president is often a source of unpopularity. A successful president knows how to ride an ever-unstable wave. Before the war in Ukraine, Biden was on the grill, the approval rate was soaring, and his party is in a panic – a recurring condition for Democrats, while Republicans are more adept at holding on.
In the first part of 2022, the Biden index was at 40 percent (now 42%), the same figure in which Donald Trump has been bogged down throughout the presidency. But Trump was so caught up in the scandals that he didn’t have time to worry about it. Those in the Biden cabinet, on the other hand, appear frustrated by this punitive data as they have accomplished much in the first ten months in which the president – who took office with a troubled economy, a pandemic at its peak and in the aftermath of a coup attempt – is been in office. They launched the largest vaccination campaign in history, passed two titanic laws, the first of which, the American Rescue Plan, boosts the economy, reducing unemployment and raising wages. With a small majority, they managed to pass a huge infrastructure bill. Yet the presidency has been portrayed for months on the verge of bankruptcy.
Initially, the decline seemed to be attributable to temporary factors such as the Delta variant or the clumsy withdrawal from Afghanistan. But as these events were consummated, the numbers continued to decline and Biden’s presidency began to disintegrate without him leaving the center. But why are voter ratings of Biden so disappointing? Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times argues that “public opinion works like a thermostat: voters regulate the temperature of politics when it moves too much in both directions.” The more ambitious a president appears to be, the stronger the thermostatic reaction against him. Biden signed two bills totaling $ 3 trillion in spending. Combined with inflation, the pandemic, social turmoil and this thermostatic public reaction, it becomes clear why his approval is falling. Because being popular as president of an angry country is difficult, if not impossible.
Barring changes, the Administration’s prospects after the midterm vote are compromised. This is not good news for the stability of the nation. A nation in which the main indicators of democracy have begun to oscillate dangerously. Does the American future promise more violence? Is your democracy under attack? The attack on the Capitol and the insurrection attempt on January 6 and the impressive increase in shootings and armed attacks speak clearly. One would think that the profound alienation of the Americans is convincing an increasing number of people to choose the use of weapons as a solution. In five Western states – Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada – pollsters find that 74 percent of citizens feel persecuted by the federal government and 54 percent by the local government. Three out of five believe that “the federal government works for the benefit of others, not mine.” Republicans and Democrats show fear on identical percentages: 85 percent are “very concerned about the health of democracy.” It is a dangerous road.
Given the drumming rhetoric of Trump and his associates, these numbers are not surprising. Despite the court rulings, many still believe the elections were rigged, as they believed Obama was not born in the United States or that Washington’s Comet Ping Pong Pizza was the basis of Hillary Clinton’s child trafficking – a thesis from the conspiracy, the latter, which led a man to shoot the visitors of the club. 20 percent of respondents believe that “political violence is justified in a democracy when things are so bad that the government does not act in the interest of the citizens.”
Since Biden’s inauguration, these figures have gotten worse. When one in five Americans advocate violent behavior and take up arms, the nation is close to default, and its stability is in jeopardy. But what does the majority of Americans still want? He wants leaders to do their jobs, to solve the problems facing the nation, to work to improve the lives of Americans. They want progress. But they probably don’t want progressivism. For example. In Waukesha, Wisconsin, six people killed and sixty injured when Darrell Brooks, driving an SUV, overwhelms a Christmas parade. Brooks should have been behind bars for a crime he just committed. But he was free, as a result of the easy bail. He walked out paying $ 500.
And the reform of the bail and its reduction for a series of crimes are causes brought forward by the democratic left. A disaster. That makes silent America grit its teeth. If you allow lesser crimes, bigger ones will arise. If bad behavior is not pursued, catastrophe is brewing. Or: Democratic California in 2014 classified possession of hard drugs and theft of assets up to $ 950 a “minor offense”. In the Bay Area, the results speak for themselves: San Francisco overdose deaths rose from 19 to 81 per 100,000 people between 2014 and 2020. Shoplifting is endemic and culminates in organized looting that has terrified shopkeepers. Meanwhile, camps for homeless and drug addicts proliferate – a failure impressively recounted by Michael Shellenberger in “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities” (subtitle: “The Collapse of Civilization on the American West Coast”).
And Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia or New York – have they improved in recent years under progressive leadership? The numbers of homeless people are on the rise, as are deaths from overdose, dysfunctions explode precisely where they should be solved by a progressive will. Perhaps we need to question the concept of social progressivism in its American declination?
On the sidelines, the stagnation of the racial question is striking. No solution, repetition compulsion of worn out mechanisms, growing intolerance and fatigue, contamination of political commitment with criminal behavior. More and more often, last year’s racially motivated protests have turned into hooliganism, such as Kenosha’s “fiery but mostly peaceful protests,” to which progressives and the media have closed their eyes. It is to be hoped that emerging urban figures such as New York Mayor Eric Adams will reverse the trend, but to do so it will take an iron wrist: will they also end up in the crosshairs? And who benefits from all this? Trump. The country will not be safe from him until the Democratic Party can defuse these lures for a new post-political “experiment” on the genre of 2016. And, after the collapse in the election of the governor of Virginia, the strategists of the party discover that things are worse than expected.
Less than a year after the midterm vote, we expect to lose the House, perhaps even the Senate. Yet there are vaccines, schools have reopened, social spending is getting stronger. But none of this seems to help Biden or the Democrats. Malaise is spreading throughout the country. The restlessness explodes. Gallup says popular support for tighter gun control has dropped 15 points over the past five years. The gap has never been wider: 91 percent of Democrats and just 24 percent of Republicans support tougher laws. The results in Virginia and New Jersey show the hemorrhage of Democratic votes among working-class voters, and experts blame part of the blame on the party’s push for gun control.
A spy lies in the reactions to the verdict for Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who killed two demonstrators in Kenosha with his rifle, after being attacked by them. New York’s dem governor Kathy Hochul tweeted, “If there were any doubts as to why we need strong gun laws, the answer lies in this ruling. All of this should never have happened. ” Biden has ethics! At Ri! Enhouse as a “white supremacist,” but has deferred to the judgment of the court. At the same time, Republicans publicized the story as exemplary of the advantages of weapons for self-defense. The person Rittenhouse injured admitted to pointing a gun at him. In the end, the acquittal came and it was no surprise. Paul Butler, a Georgetown law professor, called the trial a demonstration of “white muscle privilege.” But the majority of Americans believe that the victims of Rittenhouse have sought it, rioters involved in violent acts. The only diminished possibility is to make owning a weapon more expensive.
There is this stress that undermines the American social balance and is the child of the same anti-politics that generated right-wing extremist movements and conspiracy. It is the desire to interpret this company as the laboratory that has not been there for decades and which perhaps has never been. An elitist trend, driven by the progressive media and by vague theories advocated by the study centers of large universities and by a wide range of non-profit organizations, funded by last-minute millionaires. Put in it, in the medium term, the moralizing wave of cancel culture. Factors of ethical and cultural destabilization, destined not to obtain consensus in a terrain that seeks stability and does not stop putting the defense of acquired rights – even those that are not equitable – before the search for novelty. Under this sky, therefore, storm forecasts.
Linkiesta Magazine + New York Times World Review on newsstands in Milan and Rome and can be ordered here.
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