I’d point you to two recent pieces that you simply have to read in order to understand America as it exists now. The first is by my colleague Christopher Caldwell, writing about the opioid epidemic over at First Things. It’s an amazing, magisterial piece.
In taking full measure of where we are and how we got here, Caldwell argues that the scope of the problem we face is difficult to fully comprehend:
Salisbury, Massachusetts (pop. 8,000), was founded in 1638, and the opium crisis is the worst thing that has ever happened to it. The town lost one young person in the decade-long Vietnam War. It has lost fifteen to heroin in the last two years. Last summer, Huntington, West Virginia (pop. 49,000), saw twenty-eight overdoses in four hours. Episodes like these played a role in the decline in U.S. life expectancy in 2015. The death toll far eclipses those of all previous drug crises. . . . A heroin scourge in America’s housing projects coincided with a wave of heroin-addicted soldiers brought back from Vietnam, with a cost peaking between 1973 and 1975 at 1.5 overdose deaths per 100,000. The Nixon White House panicked. Curtis Mayfield wrote his soul ballad “Freddie’s Dead.” The crack epidemic of the mid- to late 1980s was worse, with a death rate reaching almost two per 100,000. George H. W. Bush declared war on drugs. The present opioid epidemic is killing 10.3 people per 100,000, and that is without the fentanyl-impacted statistics from 2016. In some states it is far worse: over thirty per 100,000 in New Hampshire and over forty in West Virginia. And the causes are complicated. A big part of the story is the ascendency of corporate America at the same time that American communities were being defenestrated. But it also has something to do with a culture that can’t say no to anything, that doesn’t believe in taboo, that feels the need to excuse and expunge and relieve people of agency.
Again, go read Caldwell’s piece. It’s amazing.
The other blockbuster essay comes from my friend Nick Eberstadt in the new issue of Commentary. (And by the by, if you haven’t subscribed to Commentary, you should. It’s a truly great magazine.) In “Our Miserable 21st Century” Eberstadt takes a more general, 30,000-foot view of modern America. He examines reams of data—on finances, income, health, social mobility, and more—and the picture he paints is one of a nation in serious trouble. Decline, even.
Take economic growth: Economists now believe that the potential growth rate for the United States—that is, the rate at which the economy would grow at full employment—is just 1.7 percent. Which means that the long-term growth rate is under 1 percent. The work rates for the population have similarly been revised downward. The rosy unemployment numbers you hear on the news are based on the assumption that the percentage of Americans in the labor force will never again be as high as it was in 2001. Here’s Eberstadt:
As of late 2016, the adult work rate in America was still at its lowest level in more than 30 years. To put things another way: If our nation’s work rate today were back up to its start-of-the-century highs, well over 10 million more Americans would currently have paying jobs. There is no way to sugarcoat these awful numbers. They are not a statistical artifact that can be explained away by population aging, or by increased educational enrollment for adult students, or by any other genuine change in contemporary American society. The plain fact is that 21st-century America has witnessed a dreadful collapse of work. What’s worse, this collapse of work post-2000 has coincided with an explosion of wealth for the wealth-holders. There’s no way for these opposing trends to lead to either economic or cultural or political stability. It gets worse. We are at a point where 1-in-8 American men over the age of 18 has a felony conviction. Where the average life expectancy of big chunks of the populace is moving backwards. Where geographic mobility is in its third straight decade of decline and social mobility is collapsing, too. In 1977, the average 30-year-old was almost a sure bet to be earning more money than his parents were making at the same age—he had an 86 percent chance. Today, his odds are just about even-money—51 percent.
Like I said, go read Eberstadt’s sensational piece. This is the America of 2017. Donald Trump isn’t Reagan. And morning isn’t coming.
