A year ago last week, Joe Biden was inaugurated as president of a country poised between two possible post-pandemic futures — one more dynamic and one more stagnant, one in which the shock of Covid-19 shoved American society out of our ruts and repetitions and one in which the pandemic only deepened our stagnation.
Today the president is enduring dismal approval ratings in large part because the stagnant future is winning. The dynamic scenarios have been postponed or blocked or disappointed, while the grimmer possibilities have increasingly dominated our reality. If 2020 was a year of crisis that seemed to open, briefly, into a more hopeful American future, 2021 was a year of closed doors, downward tugs and steady disappointment.
The hopes for dynamism a year ago started with the fact that we had come through the worst of the pandemic without a severe recession, and the American economy kept absorbing new infusions of cash without worrisome inflation. This suggested that there was room for an ambitious liberal agenda that basically built on the Trump-era economic expansion — rejecting austerity and using loose money and deficit spending to sustain solid growth and low unemployment deep into the 2020s. And the strong stock market in the first half of the year, the froth and excitement around cryptocurrencies especially, offered hope for a new tech boom, a blockchain boost to general growth.
All those economic hopes depended on the fact we had vaccines whose effectiveness at the time looked somewhere between impressive and amazing. But the vaccines were more than an immediate gift to economic revival. They were also treated as a proof-of-concept for an age of renewed innovation, which it was hoped the Covid experience would accelerate — with mRNA vaccines just one of a longer list of wonders, from new energy tech to new forms of transportation, from life extension to a new era of space exploration.
And along with those hopes there was also hope for dramatic social shifts. Last June the tech baron Marc Andreessen, whose widely circulated essay “It’s Time to Build” lamented American sclerosis early in the pandemic, wrote a much more bullish piece celebrating the success of technology — from vaccines to Zoom meetings — in the battle against Covid. He placed a particular stress on the success of remote work, hailing it as “permanent civilizational shift” with the potential to shatter geographical concentrations of power.
“It turns out people really can live in a smaller city or a small town or in rural nowhere,” he wrote, “and still be just as productive as if they lived in a tiny one-room walk-up in a big city.” In which case the coronavirus era might be remembered for “permanently divorcing physical location from economic opportunity” — a particularly hopeful possibility for a country as geographically polarized and politically divided as our own.
But the optimistic Andreessen essay was published just as the Delta variant began spreading around the United States in earnest, and since then, the dynamism scenario has taken a beating on almost every front.
First came the sudden rise in inflation, which hasn’t made further public investment impossible but which has definitely reduced the free-lunch opportunities that seemed to be available last spring. With that disappointment has come political disappointment for Democrats, who briefly imagined themselves building a new majority while presiding over a 2020s boom, and instead seemed poised for a big reversion, a swift return to the gridlock that has characterized American politics throughout our long era of stagnation.
Then underlying both economics and politics is the disappointment of the vaccines themselves. They are a lifesaving weapon, they clearly protect most people from the worst outcomes, and some of the limits to their effectiveness have been imposed by partisan intransigence and social dysfunction, not anything inherent to the shots themselves. But medically they have also fallen well short of the initial hopes: Their strongest protection fades fast, they require boosters at a pace that makes near-universal uptake unimaginable, and they haven’t reduced transmission enough to actually crush Covid.
So we face the specter of a world where the illness is endemic on a scale that isn’t disastrous but also isn’t great, with a spike in the air-conditioned states every summer and a flu-Covid double whammy every winter: a new normal that makes everybody’s life a little more stressful, that drags modestly but meaningfully on economic growth, that sustains a theatrical safety-ism in liberal America while making some of the Covid era’s general antisocial trends (reckless driving, violent crime, drug overdoses) a longer-term feature of our national life.
And amid all this disappointment there isn’t even clear evidence yet for the possible social upside of remote work, the hope that the professional class will be scattered geographically and our political self-segregation will modestly diminish.
I want to believe in this great-dispersal theory, and clearly some people have fled our overpriced megalopolises to raise their kids in small cities and rural splendor, or just moved to Florida or Texas from California or the Northeast. But the preliminary migration data, up to March 2021, mostly suggests a worsening of American immobility. The decades-long decline in people picking up and moving within the United States, itself a symptom of our general stagnation, only deepened under Covid conditions. Fewer people left cities and fewer people left suburbs relative to the prepandemic period, suggesting that rather than introducing a new geographic dynamism, a remote-work version of the frontier spirit, mostly the crisis just froze the social order in a thicker amber.
Oh, and if you’ve checked your Bitcoin investment lately, you know that the crypto revolution isn’t looking so hot at the moment either.
Of course all of this is just a snapshot, and a particularly grim midwinter’s one at that. What was uncertain a year ago about life after the pandemic remains highly provisional today. Most of the prophesied technological innovations still look like possibilities. We don’t know where endemic Covid will settle, and the relative mildness of Omicron offers hope that its permanent presence will be more an irritation than an open wound. The great dispersal might already be happening among elites, in numbers too small to meaningfully affect the aggregate, but with beneficial consequences over years and decades for society as a whole. The Republicans might be handed a sweeping majority in 2022 and 2024 and find their own way to governing success. (Don’t laugh.) And crypto is due for a big swing upward, I can feel it.
Overall, the best hope at the moment is that 2021 will be remembered as a year of unhappy and partial stabilization, in which various trends from the crisis year stopped getting wildly worse. Then the rest of the 2020s will give us actual improvement — a lower inflation rate, falling murder rates and de-masking and full return to normalcy for kids, more marriages and babies and moving trucks, and finally a real escape from political gridlock and a new era of abundance.
But the fact remains that if you had bet on decadence over dynamism at the start of the Biden presidency, you’d be doing a lot better than my Bitcoin investment is right now.
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