The End of the FutureThe United States has long since become a developed country undergoing underdevelopment. Life expectancy is falling. People sleeping on park benches, in subway cars, or by the side of the road are on the rise. Whole towns and small cities have died along with the industries that once gave them life. Highways, bridges, tunnels, and electrical grids — indeed, the entire material infrastructure of public life — are scandalously rotted. Public services are run down, closed, or auctioned off to private enterprises. Child labor, once thought extinct, an industrial medievalism of the sweatshop era, now shows up in nearly every sector of the economy from industrial laundries and auto-parts plants to fast-food eateries and construction sites. Adult jobs, once thought secure, got converted into various forms of precarious or temporary employment. Two-wage-earner families now earn what one-wage-earner families used to. Pensions guaranteeing a retirement income have either been replaced by ones tied to the fickle oscillations of the stock market or not replaced at all. The social safety net, a metaphorical exaggeration even in its best days, has become a Dickensian embarrassment. Rural America is despoiled terrain, abandoned or the site of superexploitation by logistics and distribution networks. “Deaths of despair” — through drug and alcohol addiction, suicide — have become epidemic, in cities and in the countryside. Rights once taken for granted — the right to vote, the right to join a union — are now contested or, for all practical purposes, denied. In the words of famed management consultant Peter Drucker, “No class in history has ever risen faster than the blue-collar worker. And no class in history has ever fallen faster.” All within less than a century. Back in the days of tsarist Russia, during the late nineteenth century, a revolutionary movement known as the Narodniks (the word meant “going to the people”) tried to arouse the Russian peasantry to overthrow the tsar. It didn’t catch on. One activist of that era mourned that “history goes too slow.” We might say about our own moment that history has gone in reverse. This in turn has generated a peculiar political response both on the Right, where it might be expected, but also on the Left, where it is strikingly strange. Call it “the politics of restoration.”
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