Do You Miss The Bad Old Days Yet?

I remember a time when some among us didn't think things could get any worse. That was pessimistic. Things can always get worse, but they don't have to.

Call it a kind of demented nostalgia, a look back not in fondness but something like a longing for when the days were bad, but not this bad. Before the collapse of democracy and the return of fascism at scale. Before the pandemic. Not too far back, though. Some time after the X-Files aired its last episode, perhaps.

The delusional optimism of the 1990s, of course, is part of the suite of problems we face today. Notwithstanding the economic struggles that persisted for more of the decade than one might recall, there was a lot of heady hopes floating around, cheques written that no one could possibly cash. The belief in something like the end of history and the inevitability and immortality of a new world order paved the way to a post-new-world-order in which backlash and resentment are equal parts warranted and misdirected. Now, the international order, such as it is and with all its faults, is on the back foot. That would be enough of a project to sort on its own without having to deal with democratic backsliding and a renewed American imperialism that would make James Monroe very pleased indeed, after he’d finished wondering what an iPhone was.

Week to week, I dip in and out of the news at different depths depending on what I’ve got to do to pay the mortgage. Each week ends up being more or less the same. The arc of our current historical, ah, unravelling would be familiar to those in the early half of the last century: economic challenges, geopolitical upheaval, institutional decay, hopeless paeans of technological solutionism, people being mean on the internet. Okay, maybe not that last one.