Social dissatisfaction and right wing revanchism

I’m stuck in the O’Hare airport for the next several hours, where I just saw a middle-aged woman wearing a hoodie with a famous mugshot of Pablo Escobar on the front. Better than a MAGA hat though . . .

As I resist the urge to spend $25 on an almost certainly very bad Margarita (the struggle is real), I will share some musings about a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is this: What are the main sources of the immense amounts of social dissatisfaction that have fueled among other things the political ascent of the worst person in the history of American politics to the presidency? (Obviously similar things are happening in lots of other countries).

Some candidates:

Inflation

The psychology of inflation is curious. It seems clear that, on average, if somebody’s income doubles over a time frame when nominal prices double, they feel more financially stressed and generally unhappy about things economic than they did before the parallel doubling. This doesn’t make sense in rational economic terms, at least as traditionally defined, but as economists and others have begun to discover in recent centuries, a lot of human sentiment and behavior doesn’t track classical economic models at all. I mean I’m not immune from this myself — that $25 Margarita is WAY cheaper, relative to my income and wealth, than the even worse beer I would occasionally purchase in college and law school, but this kind of calculation feels much more expensive now than that did then.

Enshttification

As consumer capitalism is perfected, the ability of our corporate overlords to figure out how to squeeze every last dime out of every transaction becomes ever-more powerful. This of course leads people to feel like they’re getting less for more, which as Cory Doctorow has famously pointed out, is very often the case.

Conspicuous consumption in the age of social media

Various people have noted that conspicuous consumption became much less of a thing in America at least post-first Gilded Age, probably because the Bolshies put a big scare into the Lords of Capital, and this produced a culture of what Paul Fussell called in his very amusing 1983 book Class “top out of sight.” Well in 2025 we have Kardashians in sight. This produces all the misery that invidious comparison invariably produces, which is why you see so many Buddha statuettes in front of four million dollar houses in Boulder, to remind everyone that suffering is caused by desire.

Incel culture

I think it’s difficult to overestimate the destructive effects of what could be called misogynist porn discourse, in which the practically universal experience of sexual frustration gets ideologized among young men into a kind of pervasive nihilistic rage against the world in general and women in particular.

The continuing destruction of community life in an age of bowling alone, minus the bowling

This is pretty self-explanatory

Doomscrolling

No comment necessary here either.

There are plenty of other factors but I think these are some of the big ones.

. . . Several people have pointed out that the entire right wing scream machine is dedicated to making people frightened and unhappy about the Terrible Things That Are Happening. This is an enormous factor and that I’m so used to it now to the point that it can be an unmarked category in this kind of context is telling.