The doomerism spiral

Democracy depends on optimism.

This isn’t simply a pithy slogan; it’s an encapsulation of what it means to agree that power should be allocated by consensus. If you cast a vote for a candidate who loses, you need to be optimistic both that you will not be punished for your vote and that a candidate of your choosing can win in the future. While elections are generally zero-sum contests between two sides, democracy isn’t. It and the government it undergirds are fluid things, shifted subtly by changes in how power is allocated.

Or, at least, that’s usually been the case. The second presidency of Donald Trump is not approaching his accession as a temporary granting of power by the people. Instead, it’s treating Trump as the central executor of all federal decision-making, a treatment that is prompting very little pushback from Congress or the Supreme Court, the entities specifically designed to keep his power in check.

Americans don’t like what Trump is doing. His approval rating is underwater, with more than a 10-point gap between those who approve of his presidency and those who disapprove.

For those who disapprove, though, there’s no immediate consolation, no possibility that he will suddenly face condemnation from the Republican-controlled House and Senate. Even the idea that Democrats will retake control of the House in next year’s midterms isn’t a salve for the most concerned critics of the president. Democrats won the House in 2018, but it didn’t change the trajectory of Trump’s first presidency much. Not to mention that the president and his allies appear to be doing everything in their power to cement his control over the government, from creating new House maps that disadvantage Democrats to threatening to assume federal control over local elections.

In February, YouGov asked Americans to evaluate how important certain things were to American democracy and whether those things were actually present in our system. At that point — early in Trump’s effort to remake the country during his second term — about 9 in 10 respondents said that having open and fair elections was very or somewhat important to democracy. Only about three-quarters, though, said they strongly or somewhat agree that our national elections are open and fair.

Less than half of Americans strongly agree that national elections are fair. Among American adults under the age of 30, only about a third did. That’s a striking amount of pessimism about the system.

A few years ago, I spoke with Princeton University political scientist Corrine McConnaughy. She reinforced that the central aim of a democratically elected government is to “solve problems in ways that people feel represented enough, they feel their voice heard enough.” Participants in the system need to “understand that losing today is not losing tomorrow” — an optimism that depends on the idea that there’s a possibility of future victory.

It seems likely that one reason younger Americans are relatively pessimistic about national elections is that many of them have internalized pessimism about American systems. The candidate who was most effectively mobilizing young voters in the past decade was Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), someone whose argument — as Marquette University political scientist Julia Azari once put it to me — is that “the system does not work for you.”

“And,” Azari added, “younger people were saying, ‘Yeah, that’s right. It doesn’t.’ “

There are lots of manifestations of this frustration among younger voters, including the backlash Joe Biden saw during his own presidency. Some of that centered on America’s role in Israel’s invasion of Gaza; much of it was a function of younger Americans being less engaged in party politics. A lot of it centered on rising prices, still the most obvious driver of Donald Trump’s reelection overall.

Younger Americans also have a pessimism about the country that extends beyond politics. Yes, past presentations of the economic status of millennial Americans in particular overstated how disadvantaged they have been relative to older generations. (With all due modesty, this is a point I made in my 2023 book.) But recent measures of economic confidence have seen sharp declines among young people. A poll conducted by NORC for the Wall Street Journal determined that 7 in 10 Americans think the American dream no longer holds true or never did.

That sentiment is encapsulated for many young people in the difficulty of purchasing a home — a milestone that is hampered by student loan debt, high interest rates and a graying U.S. population that bought homes decades ago in which they still live. Data from the American Community Survey conducted by the Census Bureau shows that millennials are less likely to own a home at this stage in their lives than were members of the baby boom generation or Gen X.

Why wouldn’t Americans who grew up experiencing the Great Recession and/or covid — and who saw politics dominated by older Americans and little responsiveness within the democratic system even before this second Trump administration — be pessimistic about the nation’s future? Why wouldn’t some fragile subset of that group collapse into cynicism and irony and toxic online communities where they can feel some sense of power?

I would argue that this is the reason that it’s important for Trump’s political opponents to demonstrate that they are challenging him if they hope to gain power. The president is not simply a political opponent, he is the manifestation of the system and someone who is actively trying to reshape the system so that it excludes those with whom he disagrees. Compromise is valuable in a democracy, but in the moment any talk of compromising with Trump shows a willingness from Democratic leaders to maintain the system that’s triggering so much pessimism. Two of the people that have energized the left the most in the past few years are Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Zohran Mamdani — politicians who are not part of the traditional Democratic Party and who present their politics through an optimistic lens. They are young; they argue that change is possible, if not inevitable.

Over the short term, presenting a credible, optimistic vision of the future will help disarm doomers who foresee nothing but collapse. Over the long term, reinforcing optimism — where- and however possible — is essential for maintaining democracy itself.

How that’s done, of course, is the challenge.

Photo: B-17s flying over Germany in World War II. (National Archives)