All true. But I don’t quite agree with the way he framed the issue: “As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.”
I would argue that the elites have failed us, and more depressingly, that we’ve failed ourselves. The 90s were pretty awesome. The decade started with the collapse of communism. Good governance helps us out of an early-decade recession. Democracies flourished across the world, Europe became united under the euro, and technology was ushering us into the digital, online age.
Then things went to hell. The dot-com bubble burst in 2002. 9/11 shook Americans’ confidence in their safety and the world’s stability. A pretty sketchy crowd of ideologues lied us into a massively costly and bloody war. Just as it was ending, the economy suffered its worst collapse since the 1930s—thanks largely to greedy financial companies and the lax regulators in their pockets. Things improved, but more slowly than they should have. Then we had a global pandemic, followed by another financial crisis.
Through all of this we learned that our media was incompetent: they beat the drum for the war, failed to report on the causes that led to the 2008 financial crisis, grossly mishandled the political rise of Donald Trump and, by 2020 had so little credibility they weren’t trusted to provide accurate information about the virus killing thousands every week.
Except for one mention of a politician —who was and unavoidable part of this narrative—I did my best to divorce those events from partisan politics. The vast majority of Americans are too incurious and too civically uneducated to investigate how elections, politicians, and public policy intersect to create the very catastrophes afflicting societies. To most Americans, the last quarter century has just been a series of unfortunate events. In this way, it must have felt like something happening to America, much as Krugman described it.
So of course they’re mad. In America, the contract is that the public mostly ignores politics and politicians mostly keep the trains running on time. But all but one of those events were caused by human decisions. To say they happened to us, like a ln earthquake, lets the agents of these catastrophes off the hook. Except for the pandemic—but not excepting the response to it—those disasters were intentional choices by our leaders. We live in a democracy, and every two years Americans had an opportunity to throw the bums out. We never did, and so a hefty portion of culpability lands with us.
The U.S. is suffering the familiar decline of decadent empires throughout history. We’ve had it so good for so long we’ve stopped being vigilant. Our leaders have gotten greedy and corrupt and we haven’t held them to account. Krugman started writing at the end of the “American Century” (its rise) and documented the first era of its decline. But it wasn’t passive—there were actors all along the way. Including, sad to say, the public who let it happen.
(The silver lining is that a lot of counties, post-empire, are very nice. The Netherlands, Britain, Germany, and Spain had their periods of rising and falling, and they’re all doing relatively well now. The interregnum between the fall and the post-empire can be a little rough, but the story keeps on unfolding.)
Edit: I didn’t mention climate change in this post, which I should have done. (Facebook posts are pretty first drafty.)
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