Note to readers. It seems odd to write about anything other than our national emergency, the campaign to assemble unfettered autocratic and extortionate power by taking over or hobbling the free institutions of civil society that make Democracy in America possible: law, journalism, business, the arts, the sciences, the academy, philanthropy, and more. Lacking expertise in studies of emerging autocracy, I haven’t written on this (yet).
Casual impression suggests that Americans seem to be in an increasingly despondent mood–and may have been going in a doleful direction for a while, even before Covid and the 2024 election. For example, in 2019, a large majority of polled Americans said that we are angrier now than we were a generation ago.
This post asks whether our impression of growing 21st century malaise is accurate and, if it is, who has been suffering from this malaise, when, and why. It does not cover Americans’ mental health—clinical depression, anxiety, suicidal impulses, and the like. That is for another day. This is about mood, not disorder, most specifically about Americans’ expressions of unhappiness and dissatisfaction.
There does not appear to have been between 2000 and 2020 a major or widespread deterioration in Americans’ “subjective well-being,” but perhaps modestly rising unhappiness among some White Americans. If so, why? Granting that changes in the material conditions of life may have dismayed some Americans, I explore the possibility that feelings about their private lives may have been affected by the clearly growing and generalized negativity Americans feel about their public lives.
MADE IN AMERICA 