Stubborn Cynicism Makes You Look Just As Dumb As Relentless Positivity
Good things can happen—if you try.
Optimists, rightfully, get made fun of a lot. Of course not everything will work out well. Tragedy is part of life, mistakes happen, and unforeseen consequences result from, well, everything. There’s a reason why the phrase “toxic positivity” exists, after all.
But you look just as dumb when you pretend like nothing can ever work out to benefit the masses in a society.
If you ignore even the possibility of life improving for you, your family, or your community, you become prone to nihilism and more likely to commit violence against easy scapegoats you blame for your misery. Some of you may even find it worth joining an insurrectionist mob at the U.S. Capitol to hang and maim politicians you don’t like, which happened three years ago to the day of this writing.
Here’s the thing. Life’s a mixed bag full of good, bad, and mundane. So anyone who tells you it’s all one way or another is simply not telling the truth.
With the arrival of another election year, let’s practice some nuance together. I promise, it makes you feel better than constant cynicism.
‘Why Bother?’: America’s Catchphrase In The Early 21st Century
Everywhere you look you’ll find people bemoaning the endless gridlock and hyper polarization in American politics in recent decades. But if there’s one thing the histrionic voices on the right, left, and center have agreed on since roughly Bill Clinton’s election, it’s “why bother?”
Each political persuasion goes about asking the “why bother?” question differently, but the result is a lack of conviction in pursuing things that could materially improve people’s lives, a lack of effort, and a lack of results in the face of American political and legal systems that were intentionally designed to be difficult to change.
Centrist' political project is simple: Maintain the status quo and keep the gravy train rolling—for them and their pals. Things are good for them, so they must be good for everyone—and don’t you dare point out to them that their policies are in fact hurting billions of people. They’re obsessed with everything feeling precarious, because their grasp on power—just like everything else in the universe—is subject to rapid changes that they cannot control. They play “gatekeeper” with public policy because they can, because it’s something they can manipulate—laws. They’re in power so they must be special, and certainly smarter and better than the people they were elected to represent. They withhold things their constituents want in supermajority numbers simply because they think it makes them look “savvy” and “prudent” and “wise” to say no to the things the people want in a supposed democracy. Even though they have anything they could possibly want, they feel like that could fall away at any moment. So they engineer precarity for the masses by denying them healthcare, education investment, family support, or anything that might lower prices on goods, housing, or, well, anything that could make life a little easier for millions.
In other words, “Why bother knocking the gravy train off course for us?”
On the right, radical fascists have overtaken what used to be a party built on advancing American business interests and anti-communism at home and abroad. Now, their leader calls for the termination of the Constitution so he can do whatever he wants, wants to hang people who worked for him (but said he was wrong), and uses the exact words of Adolf Hitler to describe what he will do to queer people, Muslims, Hispanic immigrants, leftists, Democrats, and “disloyal” Republicans as a “day one” dictator if you elect him.
In other words, “Why bother doing anything other than take, take, take and hurt, hurt, hurt for my own benefit?”
On the left, nothing “matters” if a Democrat does it because it’s “not enough.” Joe Biden intentionally convened a group of his own campaign staffers and Bernie Sanders’s staffers before the 2020 election so the party could agree on a mix of centrist (Biden’s preference) and progressive (Sanders’s preference) policies to implement if Biden were to win, which he of course did. One result is federal regulatory agencies staffed with Sanders’s and fellow progressive Elizabeth Warren’s acolytes. This is building an antitrust movement that should soon lead to more competition and lower prices for various goods and services across the economy. It’s also led to trillions of dollars in public infrastructure, manufacturing, climate, healthcare, and education spending across bills like the American Rescue Plan, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act, any of which would be the most progressive policy passed by any president since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the 1960s. And yet you’ll find endless examples of supposedly progressive people saying “that doesn’t count” because there’s a right wing backlash to education funding policies, or “what we really need is [something that wasn’t on the table to begin with],” or “actually, the right is winning” from Very Online progressives. When you refuse to acknowledge massive wins for things you consider important for building a better world, you sound like you don’t actually care about improving others' lives at all. Because you think your special idea would make everything perfect for everyone. (It wouldn’t.)
In other words, “Why bother because it won’t be as nice as the utopia in my head?”
What Does This Look Like In Practice?
It’s important to overcome this relentless cynicism because everywhere, in every party, politicians lurk, eager to use it to make your life worse.
Former President Donald Trump is the master of this, but politicians of all stripes do it. Trump endlessly talks about “witch hunts” against him because those are the things he is outright ordering his team to do to his opponents.
“Well, the other side must be doing it because that’s what I do” is justification of his own desires, not proof of anyone else’s actions. There is no proof of Democrats doing the things Trump has done openly, in public, on television, repeatedly. In fact, President Joe Biden spoke just yesterday at Valley Forge, the site where George Washington commanded America to victory in the Revolutionary War. He said unequivocally that political violence has no place in American life and that you can’t love your country only when you win a political contest.
Watch for yourself:
The same goes for the “there’s no way Biden won legitimately in 2020” argument, which is hit-on-the-head-with-a-shovel stupid because they showed on live television how votes were counted. Biden got more people to vote for him than Trump did. Every state counted its votes multiple times to verify the numbers in the weeks and months after the election, which you can check for yourself. Besides, Trump was in charge of the federal government during the 2020 election, so it’s pretty hard to believe that his own administration and campaign conspired with “the left” to give his opponent a win.
And yet, according to a recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll, the percentage of Americans who believe Biden won the presidency fair and square has dropped from 69% in 2021 to 62% now. Years of propaganda exploiting people’s “all politicians are crooks except the guy I like” cynicism has not helped, of course. But it takes two to tango.
People gotta be primed to believe easily debunked bullshit, and too many Americans are fully bought into an “all cynicism, all the time” mindset. But it’s not just the wannabe Hitler running the Republican Party exploiting this, either.
Have you ever heard Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat from West Virginia, talk? That guy will have you believe that it’s a slippery slope into dystopia to provide a slightly more generous monthly family assistance package to American families.
Now more West Virginia kids live in poverty simply because Manchin doesn’t like the idea he created that it’s bad to help families live easier lives. Because “why bother,” right? This way he gets to keep his explicitly corrupt coal business going to pay for his yacht home and Maserati, so he couldn’t give less of a shit about starving children in his state.
This is no different from saying, “They’ll just use it on drugs,” to justify not giving poor people assistance when all research shows poor people use “welfare” money for basic needs. This was the mindset behind welfare “reform” under Bill “rode on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane multiple times” Clinton, another Democrat who should be swept into the trash bin of history. President Biden’s decades in public service are marred by some terrible “why bother?” policy choices too, like the 1994 crime bill he wrote that has increased mass incarceration dramatically.
The same thing goes for “there’s gonna be a recession” talk that has dominated headlines for the past year-plus. The evidence keeps streaming in that we’re doing just fine in the jobs market and the stock market. The problem is high prices and interest rates, getting squeezed into paying for everything individually when we’d all pay less collectively, among other things I wrote about last week in my piece about the Federal Reserve.
So the American people are primed to believe this do-nothing worldview.
For example, the New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie wrote this week about how so many people en masse believe untrue things about Trump:
If Trump has a political superpower, it’s that other people believe he has political superpowers. They believe that any effort to hold him accountable will backfire. They believe that he will always ride a wave of backlash to victory. They believe that challenging him on anything other than his terms will leave him stronger than ever.
But this “why bother?” mindset applies to all harmful politicians in certain ways. If we don’t believe they can do anything positive, why bother trying to get them to do those things? It’s “inevitable” that only bad things will happen, right? Because it’s “savvy,” or “smart,” or “just telling it like it is,” right? Trillions of dollars invested in Americans doesn’t count because only bad things can happen, right?
Actions Are The Only Things That Matter
Good guys and bad guys exist in politics. The GOP is in the thrall of a fascist wannabe dictator, so they’re the bad guys in 2020s America. But there are good guys and bad guys in the Democratic Party, too. There are good and bad guys in media, in academia, in corporate life, in political third parties, in nonprofits, everywhere.
None of this has anything to do with having a D or R next to someone’s name. It’s not sports where you root, root, root for your team all the time no matter what. It’s about making decisions that can radically improve the lives of millions of people, or deciding to outright harm those same people just as radically.
So as we sit here on January 6, 2024, remember that big things have happened over the last few years that have made things a little easier to be an ordinary American. Those things are not enough, but we must organize to improve them, not dismiss them outright. We can use them as the basis for future wins, like fixing the housing shortage crisis and creating a robust and functional care economy for children and the elderly.
The fascists are on the march. They control one of two major American political parties. We cannot let them win and install a dictator. But we can’t let Joe Biden off the hook either. His instincts have long been “why bother?” like too many other Americans. But he’s proven himself to be adaptable and he listens to all sides of his country—even if he doesn’t implement the preferences of one side all the time. That’s what it means to lead a coalition of often competing interests in a gigantic country.
In other words, praise the good in 2024 and dedicate yourself to concrete solutions that fix the bad. Push around Biden and be loud about it. Because it works to the tune of trillions of dollars of investment in regular Americans.