Episode 11: American Pessimism

Americans have traditionally been an optimistic bunch. But over the last number of years, a new American pessimism has taken hold. Fewer Americans believe the future will be brighter than the past, fewer believe the American dream is functioning. Most believe political violence is on the rise -- and will continue. Why are we experiencing this pessimism -- and do Americans even want it to get better if that means working across the aisle?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

70% of Americans say that the American dream doesn't really hold true anymore. Only about six in ten think that they're gonna have a good life in about five years. And around 85% believe political violence is getting worse. Is America gonna be okay? For a long time, the answer felt obvious. Polls told us that Americans believe that our best days are ahead, that hard work pays off, that the American dream was alive and well. But something has shifted. Over the past several years, we've seen a rise of a certain American pessimism. Fewer people believe in the American dream, fewer people believe their lives are going to improve, and more people worry seriously about where the country is headed. In this episode, I try to explore this pessimism with my guests. I wanted to understand whether they share the same pessimism that we see in the polls, and maybe more importantly, ask my guests whether they think that the American public even wants our leaders to work together to solve the problems that are driving this pessimism. It used to be that we'd see surveys and polls that would say that people want their leaders to come together to solve problems. But now I wonder if rather people would rather see their leaders destroy the other side, destroy the other political tribe, and only then would there be a sense that things can actually get better. I started by asking people to think of America like a friend and to reflect on how that friend is doing.

SPEAKER_14 1:50

I would say they are in trouble. The I can't remember who it was that was saying that, like, what is the definition of a country? Uh like does it have a shared language, a shared culture, a shared vision, shared values, like those types of things. And I don't see any of those things in our country right now, um, like from a high level. Like individually, I see groups of people that have those things, but as a as a united group, I I think that's missing, and that's a dangerous place to be, I think, as a as a country, uh, to not have that level of of unity and uh shared perspective.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

She's not doing uh so hot at the moment. Um she's uh kind of having a a crisis of belief, maybe crisis of faith. Um an identity crisis, actually, which is uh probably what what what I would what I would say. Um she's made um decent amount of poor decisions that have kind of uh caught up with her. Um and will probably take some time to untangle.

SPEAKER_11 3:12

My friend America has um been really sick and has realized they want to get better. They are on the road to improvement. I don't know if they hit rock bottom, but they are definitely um waking up and trying to do better. They are reaching out and trying to do better.

SPEAKER_10 3:40

I think and I hope that America is in the middle of deep growing pains as it's going through adolescence, right? America's very young, super young country. Um, and I think we are at a point where we're we're in adolescence and that is painful, and it is not comfortable at all. I mean, I mean it hurts. And and so I think that's that's how I see what we're going through now in society is is we're going through some some growing pains where we're having to outgrow old clothes, um, old structures, old demographics. Um and it's painful. It's a lot of change. Very, very fast. Um I think this adolescent is going through too many changes too fast. So it's rebelling. It's gonna it's fighting with itself.

SPEAKER_09 4:53

I think my friend America might need a lawyer, lawyer up based on all the crimes they've been committing.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

People's perspectives of their friend America are pretty bleak, which lines up closely with what we're seeing in the data. When optimism about the future is falling, when only about six in ten Americans believe they're gonna have a good life in the next five or so years, it's not surprising that people look at the country and see something that is struggling, a nation struggling. The most optimistic take I heard was that America has hit rock bottom and might finally be ready to ask for help. My friends, if that's the best perspective, if that's the best case scenario, that is a pretty bad place for the nation to be. I also asked guests to reflect on the American dream. This idea that hard work pays off, that your kids will have a better life than you did, that you can build a stable life, own a home, send your kids to college, have a car in the driveway, those kinds of things. I asked them how the American dream is doing and if it's even functioning.

SPEAKER_05 6:12

Um, I don't think the American dream is functioning. Not for everyone. And until it functions for everyone, it's not alive.

SPEAKER_13 6:22

My stepdad was able to work a job, raise a family, and buy a house. And there is no way you can do that nowadays. I, you know, my kids are of that age where they're leaving the house, and to to think of them buying a house right now is not even a chance. Not a chance.

SPEAKER_08 6:44

It is a little scary right now because you don't really know, you know, how things are going to turn out. Um, like I said, I just kind of always try to coach my kids on just being really flexible and interpreting what's going on in the country so they can they can survive and and be um you know come out, you know, okay. Um I don't know. It's uh it's a tough, it's a tough time that we're in right now. I feel I feel sad for them more than me.

SPEAKER_04 7:18

We're wrestling with this AI thing. Um it seems to me like our leaders aren't capable of protecting the population, and it seems to me like it'll be inevitable that AI will force uh labor into menial work at best, and it will the American dream will be destroyed.

SPEAKER_07 7:48

And in general, America is struggling with that core notion of I think of again freedom, American dream, all of that. I think America is struggling. I think of these almost this um vacuum of hope, right? Where people aren't having necessarily kids because when people are happy and healthy and the economy is doing well, people are having babies, people are reproducing. But when it's you know harder and harder to kind of make ends meet, people make tougher decisions when it comes to should we have another child.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

I mean, I I look at uh I look at my age group, I'm in my 40s, and my children I guess are Gen are they Gen Z? I think Gen Z, Gen A. I'm not I'm not sure anymore. I'm I'm not sure. Yeah, I think I at least two of them are Gen Z, I think. I don't know. But either way, my generation, maybe a generation below me, was the last one who actually saw people work hard, go to school, do what they needed to do, and came out okay. The last decade of politics for them that they have seen has been an absolute nightmare. I don't care what side you're on, and so they're looking at all of these things, and I don't even know if they would call it pessimism as much as just why would I be hopeful?

SPEAKER_11 9:34

So I think the dream has changed a little bit, but I do not think our best days are behind us. I think we're struggling, and I think we went we've deteriorated quite a ways, but like I I have also said, I believe that people are recognizing that and saying, no, no, no, we've got to do better.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

Again, a pretty grim assessment, and again, it mirrors the polling. When around 70% of Americans say that the American dream doesn't really hold true anymore, what you hear in these conversations starts to make a lot more sense. The most hopeful version wasn't that the American dream is alive and well, it was that maybe, well, maybe we could get back to the American dream if we all tried really hard. Perhaps more concerning, an even darker cloud over the overall pessimistic view of America. I asked about political violence in the United States. We've seen a lot of such violence in recent years. We saw Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota murdered in their home. We saw Charlie Kirk murdered at a rally. The fact is, I could go on about this for an hour and point to moments of terrible violence that have no place in our country. So, do my guests think that this is a moment in time, something that is fleeting, or is this something that we're not really going to easily be able to pull ourselves away from the current trajectory?

SPEAKER_02 11:10

Unfortunately. It seems to be that's the way that we are trending. Um, as much as I can find hope and genuinely do believe that there is hope for better days. Um there's been a lot of more extreme ideologies, more extreme elements in our society, more divisions that have been given voice and have been mainstreamed. And it will take a while to address that.

SPEAKER_12 11:49

Um, and I think in the younger age brackets, think violence is at times acceptable in these kind of things. So yeah, I don't have a good feeling about that, honestly.

SPEAKER_14 12:01

There's something like 40 to 60 percent of young people think that violence is an option to um to address uh different viewpoints, um, which again goes back to the ideology of things like when speech is violence, like it's fine to use violence to to address violence, um, like just from a rational perspective. That that's the natural progression of that thought process. Um, so like that ideology, in my opinion, is dangerous for these reasons. Like it leads to instead of having a discussion where we can disagree respectfully, the only option is to elevate to physical violence. And I don't think that's healthy.

SPEAKER_05 12:40

We need to see any outbreak of violence as someone having a match at a gasoline station and do everything we can to extinguish that match before it drops. Um, because trauma, you know, violence is a very, very, very powerful force in that not only does it have immediate trauma effects on each case, David, that trauma can carry for decades.

SPEAKER_09 13:19

I believe that because of you know our Second Amendment right and how gun-ho we are about protecting it and making it as easily accessible to everyone, regardless of their state of mind, it's only going to continue to get worse.

SPEAKER_07 13:36

I feel like it will probably get worse. I think of the shooting in Kent, Ohio back in the day, like when that happened, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, when RFK was assassinated, JFK was assassinated. Those are major moments in which we saw this kind of like societal kind of shift happening, right? I don't think we've reached that.

SPEAKER_03 14:03

This is clearly very bad. Um, I'm not convinced that it's going to get worse. I don't uh um I don't know how it could get worse, but but I don't I don't necessarily believe that. But it is clearly something we need to address as a county commissioner. That we do not do well in the mental behavioral health arena. We just are we're we're we're really bad at it. And that was very clear the staff would tell me that.

SPEAKER_11 14:28

So I have a lot of concerns. Is it going to get worse? I don't know, but I believe it will get better eventually. Because again, I strongly believe that people will not allow it to completely annihilate us. I don't think that that we're going to be dead in the water before we wake up to it.

SPEAKER_04 14:53

Well, it really depends how this government and the next administration handle violence. It seems to me like compared to the Biden administration, law and order is important for the Trump administration. And the Biden administration was absolutely the opposite. And so they fostered this environment to boil over. In fact, they still, the the leaders of the people that were in that administration are still fanning the flame.

SPEAKER_09 15:33

When you brought up the political violence, and where it's have it's being like heavily implied, oh, most of the political violence comes from the left, but whenever you look at the statistics, it's all it's generally the right committing like over, I believe it was like over 80% of political violence is being committed by the right.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

Here there is near total agreement. People believe things are likely going to get worse, which, again, is exactly what the data shows. About 85% of Americans say that political violence is increasing. Yet, there's also a sense that perhaps this will burn out. Whether it burns out or not, people seem very reasonably concerned. And not surprisingly, at least a few of my guests were quick to point the finger at the other political tribe to say, oh, it's not my side, it's the other side. And I understand that mentality. It's a tough place to be. So the final question that I asked my guests was: do we even want solutions? Do we even want this to get better? In my thinking, this might be the most important question of all. Do people even want society to be healed? Historically, Americans have said that they want their political leaders to reach across the aisle, to work with opponents to try to solve the kinds of issues, to solve the kinds of problems that divide America. But right now, do Americans even want that anymore? Or do we want our leaders to fundamentally find a way to destroy the other side, to vanquish the other side, and have complete victory? And then and only then is there a sense the problems can be solved.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

But I get the impression that a lot of people just want to win. And that winning looks like protecting some sort of either ideology or life experience that feels threatened at the moment. Um and so if my life, the way that I live my life, feels threatened, I want to protect that. Um and if I'm told over and over again that the person on the other side of town is the one that's trying to take it away, um why would I want to bridge a divide with him?

SPEAKER_14 18:01

Yeah, from from my personal interactions, I I don't see either. Like I think they just want to be able to live life like in a peaceful community and not have to deal with all of this stuff. Uh I think the the inflammation comes from the extremes of both parties that like most people just want to go to work and have the ability to afford a house and to have a car and to go on vacations now and then now and then.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

I think most people want things to get better. I think most people. I think in an average, you go back to random number, 1993. You have 5% on each side who think like what you just said. Um, but I think the other 90% of Americans, they they want their kid to have a better life than they did. They want to be able to have a job they enjoy. Like it they they just want they just want to live. Um and I still don't think it's the majority of Americans, but I do think that it's about again 15% on each side who are saying, I don't care if I lose every dime, if like if these tariffs go horribly, but it makes you go away, then you're gone. If the next democratic president um you know uses massive amounts of power to make you go away, then yeah, it's kind of a scary power grab, but as long as you're gone, then so be it. And so I think that's where a decent amount, a larger amount than normal are feeling that way. I don't think it's the majority. I think the majority of people are still very much, I just want to live.

SPEAKER_03 20:11

The majority of American citizens want things to get better. I think they really do want to see the sides work together. Uh, I do believe, however, that there are factions that have exploited this idea of no, first we need to win, and then things will get better. And I think that uh that that part of it, and that's again where I believe social media has enhanced that that that ability of people to put out those those ideas, uh, and and uh give us the the greater appearance that that's true.

SPEAKER_06 20:48

Small percentage that wants that, that wants to continue to fan the flames, and there's a small percentage of Americans who will join right in with them. Um, but I think that's small. The problem is that that's the group we always see on TV. But I think that that's a smaller percentage than overall. I think a greater majority of people really want it to calm down and want it to want the rhetoric to stop.

SPEAKER_10 21:14

There are definitely people who act and behave as if they've given up, they say they've given up, but there's a lot of people who have not given up.

SPEAKER_11 21:23

I think everybody wants it to get better. I think people are starting to understand, and compromise is a tricky word, but we want us to come together and understand each other. I think that we want us to work together. I really don't think people are looking just to win at this level, at the majority general level. I don't think people are just trying to win, they are trying to understand.

SPEAKER_13 21:48

It really seems like it's just one party wants to get a win for them and they want to screw the other party. And that's really what is it's come down to.

unknown 21:59

I

SPEAKER_13 22:00

think with the general American people. Um I I wouldn't necessarily say that they're the same way. I think I think people inherently are good and they want to find common ground with everyone that they come in contact with.

SPEAKER_12 22:19

I think they'd rather have their team run. That's one of the needles that has to move. And I do have, you know, people say to me they don't believe in bridging. Their side needs to win.

SPEAKER_00 22:33

On this final question, there's perhaps a bit more optimism, but only a bit. Many guests feel that at least at some level Americans do want solutions, that we haven't completely given up on the idea of working together. But some didn't even see that. For some, even that's uncertain. And taken together, this conversation paints a pretty bleak picture. The data across multiple organizations says that we're losing faith in the future. We've lost faith in the American dream. Increasingly people are worried about violence and when you talk to people you hear it. You hear it in their voices. You hear it in their tone. You hear the same story. So the question isn't just whether or not America is struggling. Clearly people think that it is it's whether we still believe in each other enough to do something about it. My name's David Combs and this is Nobody's side. Thanks for joining