Everything Is Awful

What if shapeless disgruntlement is the most powerful force in our politics?

Photo by Juhan Sonin

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Donald Trump’s victory has a thousand fathers, but as time goes on we may place more and more importance on a factor that’s easy to lose sight of when we focus too narrowly on particular variables like egg prices, or the Harris campaign’s inadequate ground game in eastern Pennsylvania, or whatever other explanation you find most interesting.

What if the problem — the big, overarching problem — is just that things kinda suck, in ways both political and not, and as a matter of perception even if not reality?

As much as my job as an analyst is to take politics apart and perform a kind of non-statistical multivariate regression in which all the different factors at play are assessed and compared for their various effects on the outcomes this system produces, I’m increasingly leaning toward the conclusion that the details mattered less than the sentiment, that we need to pull back and consider the pervasive sourness that envelopes the country.

That sourness has component parts to it, but what matters is the way they have all added up to a general ill feeling. You can date it back as far as you like, but the prime suspect is the covid pandemic, a trauma that still profoundly affects us. That’s true not just for those who lost family members or businesses, or whose kids basically lost a year of schooling, but for everyone, the way it blanketed the country in misery and left us at each other’s throats. One of the most revealing data points is that during the pandemic, pedestrian deaths skyrocketed. People were just driving angry.

Then there was inflation, and then there’s the way contemporary media has us all standing in front of a firehose of outrage and contentiousness with our mouths open, leaving us convinced that the world is full of hatefulness and our fellow citizens are terrible. Add that to the multitude of annoyances of everyday life, and you have a recipe for a surly public.

In so many ways, what looks like progress and improvement exist alongside simmering dissatisfaction or even anger. One currently relevant example: Because of the Affordable Care Act, more people have health coverage than ever, and insurers can’t deny you coverage because of pre-existing conditions, which is great. But those same insurers drag suffering people into Kafkaesque nightmares of bureaucratic cruelty every day, and it’s so bad that millions will cheer when an insurance company CEO gets gunned down on a sidewalk.

This is one of the dilemmas of modernity: Our expectations are constantly being reset in ways that often prevent us from appreciating the good things — or at least the better things — we have, and instead lead us to focus on what’s unpleasant and irritating, even when it’s less than catastrophic. For instance, it’s a miracle that you can climb in a steel tube and hurtle through the stratosphere at 500 miles an hour, then be on the other side of the country in a few hours. At the same time, flying has become more and more unpleasant, as the airlines impose junk fees, squeeze more people onto planes, and generally try to milk you for every last dollar they can. I don’t know about anyone else, but just being asked to spend another $25 to choose my seat, even if I don’t bother, makes me feel embittered and angry. Everything gets more sour.

Enshittification is everywhere

By now you may have heard of enshittification, a term coined by the brilliant writer Cory Doctorow. At first he used it to describe the lifecycle of social media and e-commerce platforms, the way they start as something new, useful, and fun, and eventually turn into hellscapes of irritation and exploitation:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Put aside the last part (since sometimes it takes a long time for them to die) and you’re familiar with how this has played out. Google, for instance, started as the best search engine, but once people were locked into using it, it just got worse and worse, and today when you do a Google search you’ll be served some AI slop, then a bunch of ads, then a bunch of useless results that aren’t what you’re looking for. Everybody kind of hates Google now, but Google doesn’t care; its parent company Alphabet made $174 billion in profit in 2023, and they’ll do even better this year.

Enshittification is everywhere, often (but not always) driven by technology. Paying with a tap of a card or phone is great, but why am I being asked to give a tip at a freaking convenience store? It’s incredible that I never have to ask for directions since the magical rectangle in my pocket can tell me how to get where I’m going. But every time I ask it to, I think of how all my movements are being tracked and that information bought and sold, and I feel just a little angry.

The term has caught on because it captures so well something we can all see and have experienced. But it hasn’t really been thought of as a political force, and maybe it should be.

The Biden administration made real de-enshittification progress

In a perfect world, the government would identify the processes of enshittification that are making our lives worse and do something about them. Whatever Joe Biden’s failures, his administration really did try to address some of the most egregious examples of enshittification in Americans’ lives, as both workers and consumers. Here are some of the things they did:

• Outlawed most non-compete agreements, which prevent workers from leaving their jobs to find better jobs in the same industry

• Forced airlines to give prompt refunds for cancelled flights and major delays

• Passed a “click-to-cancel” rule requiring that canceling a subscription or a gym membership be as easy as signing up in the first place

• Expanded overtime protections for workers

• Limited the overdraft fees banks can charge, as part of a broad crackdown on junk fees

• Required cable providers to give consumers “all-in” pricing that shows how much you’re actually being charged

There are other actions you could also classify as de-enshittification if you wanted, from environmental enforcement to student loan forgiveness. But the trouble is that many of the measures I just listed have either been torpedoed by conservative judges or just haven’t taken effect yet. This produced a deeply perverse series of events: Biden does something great/Trump-appointed judge strikes it down/Voters see no benefit from it, continuing to feel crappy/Voters then elect Trump because they feel crappy.

Trump contributed greatly to the overall sourness, because he made politics so personal and cruel and generally unpleasant. If you want to argue it wasn’t all his fault, fine — but nobody can claim that politics isn’t meaner and angrier than it was ten years ago. Making things even worse, when everybody feels bad, they’re likely to blame established institutions, and many of them will see hope in the most loudly anti-institution politician. And guess who that is.

There’s a counter-argument to all this, and one that isn’t unreasonable: Actually, it says, things are pretty great! I’ll let Kevin Drum make the case:

At the same time incomes are high and we have the best standard of living on the planet. Crime is low. Teen pregnancies are down. Poverty is declining. Economic growth is spectacular. Technology is amazing. Divorce rates are down. Teen drug use is low. Racism is declining. Gay acceptance is rising. We're not fighting any wars. The federal government is not going bankrupt. Driverless cars are just around the corner. Medical care is on the cusp of a golden age. The war against abortion has largely failed. Our educational system does a top notch job for everyone except Black students. Bullying is down.

Now, it's also true that mass shootings aren't going away. Global warming isn't going away. Crazy politicians aren't going away. The black-white education gap isn't going away. The world is never 100% peaches and cream.

But overall, life in America is the best of any country in any era of history and looks set to stay that way for a while. Our lives are almost miraculous in their prosperity.

We had this argument about the economy and whether it was being reported on accurately all through the last year. During that time I took the position that while there were fundamental problems that date back decades, the Biden administration’s economic performance was excellent by almost any measure, and they ought to get credit for it. The response to that was often “Stop trying to tell people everything is great, that’s not what the see in their own lives,” which was simultaneously a willful misreading of what people like me were arguing, an excuse for ignoring facts, and, perhaps, an accurate read on the effects of general sourness.

So yes, when Trump would literally say “We’re living in hell,” it was bonkers, but it also tapped into people’s real feelings and allowed too many of them to convince themselves that he might fix whatever was pissing them off, when in fact he’ll almost certainly make it worse.

Understanding the importance of widespread disgruntlement doesn’t necessarily dictate any particular political strategy. As I’ve said before, for all that Democrats are beating their breasts about how to remake themselves, they could do absolutely nothing and they’ll probably still have a great election day in November 2026 (and for good measure, the people saying Trump has built a durable Republican majority are out of their minds).

You’ve probably seen this map, showing how Trump improved on his 2020 performance everywhere, in red states and blue, small counties and large:

This has been taken as evidence of the genius of Trump’s campaign, the abysmal failure of Harris’s, or evidence of a lasting philosophical shift in the electorate. But it may be better understood as showing that there was something deep and elemental thrumming under the election, afflicting Americans wherever they were, and it had very little to do with which ads were aired or how many doors were knocked on or which slogan tested better than which other slogan — or, for that matter, anything connected to ideology.

If we all feel like things kinda suck today, there’s a good chance we’ll still feel that way in four years, and the public will be inclined to turn out the party in power. Again.