Contemporary fascism and improving standards of living

Piglet42 has a comment in Scott’s thread about RFK Jr. dismantling America’s vaccine system that I believe is very much onto something:

This particular disaster could only happen because a majority of Americans are completely oblivious to the importance of modern medicine in their lives. It’s not that there’s a majority of anti-vaxxers. There are probably 10-15% who agree with RFK’s charlatanerie and some of them voted for Trump for that very reason – finally an anti-science figure who promises to destroy modern medicine, I’m on board! There are far more people who care about the issue and are in favor of science, but those would have voted Dem anyway so RFK didn’t take any votes away from Trump. As egregious that sounds, it’s well possible that the anti-vaxx anti-science crowd put Trump over the top.

But they only matter because the vast majority of Americans, probably 70% or more, simply don’t give a shit about it, and the reason they don’t care is becausethey have benefited so much from modern medicine that they have forgotten how it would be without.

I know this may be an unpopular take but Trump owes his victory almost certainly less to the dysfunction of the system than to the fact that it has worked so well in recent decades that people think they can afford the luxury to not care. In other words people go fascist because liberal democracy has been so good to them. It will take some truly catastrophic events – pandemics, botched hurricane responses, food shortages due to trade chaos and deportations of workers – until these Americans will maybe come back to their senses and start caring about functioning government again.

I think there is definitely something to this.

Now this comes with a lot of caveats. Yes, contemporary American society really screws the bottom 10% and even more so the bottom 5% of the SES distribution. I spent most of May in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and was struck by how much sheer human wreckage you can see on the streets. In Boulder I have come to assume rather vaguely that similar scenes of extreme individual and social dysfunction, which are common, are a product of the peculiar dynamics of a town loaded with rich idle people who might be promising targets for what in the rest of the world is called begging but in Protestant Work Ethic Land has always been called “panhandling” for some reason, that reason being that we don’t have beggars in America, which is one of those third world things.

Twenty and even ten years ago you didn’t see nearly as much of this kind of thing in either Boulder or Kalamazoo. So yeah, if you’re near the bottom of American society you have every reason to be seriously unhappy with how things are going in this country. But guess what, almost nobody in that demographic votes, and it has essentially nothing to do with the rise of contemporary American fascism aka Trumpism, except indirectly.

The people who are responsible for that rise are people who, by all objective measurable standards, are VASTLY better off than they were when America was supposedly “great.” This kind of diffuse dissatisfaction is also very common among liberals and leftists, although it gets expressed differently at the level of political behavior of course.

I’m 65 years old, and the improvement in the basic features of so much of life in America since 1960 (which is as good a proxy as any for the purported Golden Age of MAGA nostalgia) is almost indescribable. To use one extremely obvious example, the whole Make America Healthy Again thing that Kennedy shills is bizarrely counter-factual. Americans are by all actual measures of health, as opposed to bullshit measures such as how fat people are, immensely healthier than they were in 1960. This can be shown in a million different ways, but just look at the age-adjusted death rate per 100,000, which is as bottom line as you can get:

1960: 1,332.6

2019: 715.3

This shot up during the pandemic of course, but in 2024 it was just about back to the pre-pandemic level.

In terms of basic economics, median family income has more than doubled over this same time frame, from $47K to 101K. This is in 2023 dollars, and note this is the median. The mean has increased by even more because of growing wealth inequality, which is related to diffuse anxiety and dissatisfaction among the non-super rich and even among them, because of incredibly fucked up ideation about what being “really rich” means. So yes this is all very complicated.

When I posted a similar stat a few weeks ago there were some comments along the lines of yeah but housing is so much more expensive now and housing costs aren’t part of the CPI. This is just wrong: housing costs are part of the CPI, and in any event housing costs are so high in large part because people in the middle of the income distribution have twice as much annual income as they did back when America was truly great. This isn’t to deny that there’s a housing affordability crisis in America for people toward the bottom of the SES distribution, but again those people aren’t the people that are putting a fascist in the White House because of their deep dissatisfaction with contemporary American life.

This is of course an immensely complex topic, but what I’m trying to sketch here is the idea that, as the comment I quote at the beginning of the OP argues, the rise of neo-authoritarianism/fascism in the USA, and probably in a lot of other rich countries as well, is a product of some dynamic by which the very fact that life is getting so much richer and easier for the typical Trumpist voter is in some perverse way fueling that voter’s sense of profound dissatisfaction.

Yesterday I was struck by the fact that it genuinely annoyed me that it took me 10 minutes of finagling to find a New Yorker essay from 1960 so I could email it to a friend, instead of the 30 seconds that I assumed this task would require. I was also struck by the fact that I can listen to basically any piece of music I want to listen to more or less instantaneously anywhere, and that I have literally thousands of movies and TV shows available for instant viewing at a very minimal cost. Etc etc.

There’s something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear, but the claim that people are getting more and more unhappy because life has gotten better in so many ways DEFINITELY has something to it. Now of course this means life must be getting worse in some other, less obviously definable ways, that have to do with various forms of social and spiritual alienation, which are very real and very devastating even though they don’t get reflected in GDP statistics or Netflix downloads. So I’m NOT saying that everything is good and people are just a bunch of whiny babies. That’s obviously not the case at all.

But there’s something about rising standards of living in contemporary life that are directly correlated to toxic political reaction, which is why the whole idea of making America great again is so utterly bizarre on multiple levels. And yes I realize that a lot of that has to do with the uppity women and blahs not knowing their place, but it goes way beyond that, which is what this post is about.