Letting go of my last big myth

Like most people I know, I spent last week recovering from the election result. But I've heard a number of those same people quietly expressing surprise that they didn't feel worse—that 2016 was somehow more of a gut-punch than 2024.

Same here.

Intellectually, this makes no sense. The situation is almost inconceivably bad and the danger much greater than it was in 2016. Four years of planning by Trump's acolytes and enablers plus the popular vote mandate plus another government trifecta and a compliant Court and virtual immunity for anything he does will make disaster so much more likely. The lives of vulnerable people will be made even worse, and every divide in the country will be intensified. I've consumed enough good analysis to see all of that in excruciating detail.

So why is my emotional response more blunted than it was?

When the election was called in 2016, I physically retched. I kept falling apart at my desk for weeks. I met with other liberals and talked it out. I alternately withdrew into myself and reached out in protest. It was incredibly disorienting.

This time, despite an even deeper conviction of pending catastrophe, I haven't felt the same gut punch. I am sickened and every bit as determined to oppose what's coming, but something is different.

I think 2016 broke something in me that couldn't be re-broken.

A cherished myth

I wasn't raised in the myth of Jesus, not in any serious way. But for as long as I can remember, the myth of progress had an equivalent hold on me.

The myth of progress is woven into our national self-image and into the progressive outlook (hence the name). When MLK said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," he was invoking the myth of progress—the belief that humanity is on a halting but consistent trajectory toward a brighter future for all. Back up far enough and you will see the global expansion of rights, growing literacy, declining poverty, and accelerating technologies making life easier and better.

Star Trek, the gospel story of my youth, captures the myth perfectly. In the distant future, not just the nations of Earth but many planets are united in a peaceful federation. Guided by the Prime Directive of non-interference, a multi-ethnic crew explores the galaxy where no [one] has gone before.

Like The West Wing, it's a cherished work of progressive wish-fulfillment.

Like most beloved myths, sustaining the myth of progress is largely a matter of what you choose to notice and how far back you stand. The pandemic erased nearly a decade of improvements in life expectancy, and future gains are likely to be constrained by climate change and other challenges. After 30 years of progress in poverty reduction, The World Bank has now warned of a "historical reversal" in development for the world's poorest nations. And the jury is decidedly out on the benefits of recent and pending technological leaps.

In US politics, every progressive era has been followed by a conservative backlash. Attempts by Republicans to extend civil rights to formerly enslaved people led to the restoration of white supremacy, largely by Democrats, and eventually Jim Crow. FDR's New Deal was followed by the rollbacks of the Conservative Coalition in Congress. The civil rights and women's rights achievements of the 1960s and 1970s gave us Reagan and the Moral Majority. And everything about Obama led to a conservative resurgence, culminating in our current hellscape.

There's no reason to expect the future to break free of that pattern.

My deconversion

If the myth of progress continues to dwell in your heart, you may be preparing a comment that can be summarized as "two steps forward, one step back." I love that for you. I would prefer it for myself, I guess. But eight years ago, that reflex broke in me.

The 2016 presidential election result was so egregious, the difference between the deeply competent former secretary of state and senator on one hand and the deeply disordered game show host on the other was so profound that it felt like that moral arc had been sucked sideways into a black hole.

Like any true believer, I clung to my myth long after it stopped making sense. Jesus was always coming to save us, just pray harder and be ready.

In 2024 it was going to be Gen Z saving us, finally old enough to exert real electoral power. Then a third of Gen Z voted for Trump, who drew a larger proportion of under 30s than any Republican presidential candidate since 2008, including his two previous runs. He was more convincing this time.

He also improved his support among Hispanic voters by 14 percent over 2020—another of our hoped-for saviors.

Of course it's galling to mention other cohorts before my own: 84% of Trump voters were white, most of them men. We are and apparently will remain the problem.

There will be progress again. But the conditions of life on Earth will also continue to worsen, which drives politics to the right. I no longer believe in the inevitably shiny future. And the lesser gut punch this time tells me that that lovely conviction was already gone long before Pennsylvania was called.

My pre-disillusioned daughter

My youngest turns 23 this week and graduates from college next month. Because she is intelligent, compassionate, and politically aware, I expected the election result to unmoor her the way 2016 did me.

It didn't.

She has the mind and heart of an activist and social critic. She wanted Harris to win (and Trump to lose) as much as I did. But when it went the other way, she was disappointed but recovered her footing quickly. Looking at population political dynamics, she had come to see Trump's victory as inevitable, and that none of the hot takes now being floated as "the thing Harris should have done" would have mattered.

"That makes me feel more at peace with it," she said.

It also helps that, despite being raised by two arc-bending progressives, she never bought into the myth of progress to begin with. She never had the chance.

It's not just her. Born in the wake of 9/11, raised with active shooter drills, Gen Z came of age into a global pandemic with a grotesque cartoon president in the White House. They are heading out of school and into impossible rents and stagnant wages, saddled with enormous debts for the college education they were told (by people like me) that they absolutely had to have, and trying to imagine their future in the shadow of a climate catastrophe we're doing very little about.

As my daughter once searingly put it, everything is broken.

The title of an Atlantic article by Annie Lowrey puts it perfectly: "Generation Z Doesn’t Remember When America Worked." They've never had a chance to believe in inevitable utopias.

I doubt I'll completely shake my delusions. But watching my daughter navigate a broken world without the scars of deconversion might help me get closer.