Why Aren’t Americans as Optimistic as They Were in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s?

[Hardkill]

I’ve been wondering why Americans have been so persistently pessimistic about the country over roughly the past decade, especially compared with more optimistic periods in the mid-to-late 1980s, the 1990s, and parts of the 2000s before the 2008 financial crisis.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that everything is fine today or that Americans have nothing legitimate to worry about.

I still have very strong concerns about Trump and the Republican Party, while also remaining very disappointed with much of the Democratic establishment. I also really dislike what I would call the “slopulism” coming from some progressive populists and Leftists—the tendency to reduce extremely complicated economic and political problems to simplistic narratives in which everything is completely rigged, corrupt, collapsing, or controlled by a handful of elites.

I’m still seriously worried about American democracy and civil liberties, extreme economic inequality, concentrated wealth and political influence, extreme partisan polarization, and the gridlock that has made governing the country much harder.

So my argument isn’t that America has no serious problems.

What I’m wondering is why those problems have seemingly prevented Americans from recovering the kind of national optimism that periodically existed during earlier decades, even while many other aspects of American life have improved.

Those earlier decades certainly weren’t paradise.

The 1980s had high crime, AIDS, the Cold War, and the aftermath of stagflation. The 1990s had recessions, racial unrest, political scandals, etc. The 2000s had 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, and growing polarization.

Yet Americans still seemed capable of bouncing back into periods of fairly broad optimism.

That became much harder after the Great Recession.

And what makes this especially strange to me is that it can’t simply be explained by Americans becoming unable to survive economically.

Consider what happened after 2008.

The country went through the worst financial crisis and recession since the Great Depression. But the Obama years also produced a substantial recovery and reform period.

The Recovery Act supported an economy that was hemorrhaging jobs. Dodd-Frank substantially changed financial regulation and created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Affordable Care Act produced a major expansion of health-insurance coverage. Obama also signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Fair Sentencing Act, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed, same-sex marriage became legal nationwide during his presidency, and the country elected its first African-American president.

In 2011, American forces also finally killed Osama bin Laden.

Meanwhile, unemployment eventually fell from about 10% following the financial crisis to below 5% by the end of Obama’s presidency. Crime continued its long-term decline, while smartphones, medicine, entertainment, transportation safety, and access to information improved dramatically.

So by the later Obama years, you could plausibly tell a relatively optimistic story:

“We suffered the worst financial collapse since the Depression, avoided another Great Depression, recovered economically, strengthened financial regulation, expanded healthcare, brought unemployment back down, killed bin Laden, expanded civil rights, and continued advancing technologically.”

Yet that never became anything resembling the sustained national optimism of the late 1980s or late 1990s.

The economic expansion then continued through most of Trump’s first term.

By 2017–2019, unemployment was extremely low, inflation remained low, household incomes were rising, and roughly three-quarters of American adults reported that they were doing okay financially or living comfortably.

Crime was far below its early-1990s peak, while technology, medicine, entertainment, transportation safety, access to information, healthcare coverage, LGBT rights, and many other aspects of American life were much more advanced than several decades earlier.

Leo himself has made this broader point. He has said that the world is “more peaceful and civilized than ever” and has pointed to declining crime, less pollution and smog, safer vehicles, incredible and inexpensive technology, greater social tolerance, and unprecedented access to knowledge.

Then came the 2020s.

COVID was obviously catastrophic, and the inflation shock imposed real costs on households. But the United States also recovered remarkably quickly from the pandemic recession. Employment rebounded rapidly, unemployment returned to very low levels, and inflation eventually fell dramatically without the severe recession that many economists feared.

And I also think it is important not to understate how unusually ambitious Biden’s domestic-policy agenda was relative to recent Democratic administrations.

The American Rescue Plan included direct household relief, expanded unemployment assistance, aid to state and local governments, and a temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit. Census found that the Supplemental Poverty Measure child-poverty rate fell from 9.7% in 2020 to 5.2% in 2021, its lowest level on record at the time; the expanded Child Tax Credit alone lifted about 2.9 million children above the poverty line.

The law also created a special financial-assistance program for severely underfunded multiemployer pension plans, protecting pension benefits for large numbers of union workers and retirees.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law committed major federal investment to roads, bridges, public transit, water systems, broadband, the electric grid, ports, and other infrastructure, while incorporating labor and domestic-manufacturing provisions.

The CHIPS and Science Act put roughly $50 billion through the Commerce Department toward rebuilding domestic semiconductor manufacturing and research capacity, including $39 billion in manufacturing incentives and $11 billion for research and development.

The Inflation Reduction Act represented another major departure from recent policy. It created large long-term incentives for clean energy and domestic manufacturing, including provisions encouraging prevailing wages and apprenticeships. It also changed Medicare prescription-drug policy by allowing negotiation of certain drug prices, capping covered insulin at $35 per month for Medicare beneficiaries, imposing a $2,000 annual Part D out-of-pocket cap beginning in 2025, and requiring rebates when certain drug prices rise faster than inflation.

His administration also adopted a much more explicitly labor-oriented posture than had been typical of recent Democratic administrations. Biden created a White House task force specifically aimed at encouraging worker organizing and collective bargaining, and his appointees to the NLRB adopted rules and decisions more favorable to union organizing, including the 2023 Cemex framework.

The administration also substantially expanded access to Public Service Loan Forgiveness; by October 2024, the Education Department said more than one million public-service workers had received forgiveness through the program, compared with about 7,000 before the administration took office.

So Biden’s domestic agenda combined things that had often been treated separately in recent decades:

stronger labor policy + industrial policy + climate investment + infrastructure + expanded healthcare subsidies + prescription-drug reform + redistribution toward families + manufacturing policy + pension protection.

Whether someone agrees with all of those policies is a different question. My point is that this was not an administration doing nothing while the country stagnated.

The United States also finally ended its 20-year military involvement in Afghanistan, although the withdrawal itself was chaotic and controversial.

And yet Americans remained deeply pessimistic about the country and distrustful of its institutions.

So what explains this disconnect?

Maybe economic inequality is much more important than raw living standards. Even if most people are materially better off than several decades ago, perhaps extreme inequality makes people feel that economic progress is unfairly distributed and gives wealthy individuals and corporations excessive political influence.

Maybe it’s political polarization and gridlock. The two sides have become so hostile to one another that perhaps America can no longer have a broadly shared feeling that “the country is doing well.” Whichever party governs, tens of millions of Americans on the other side believe the country is moving in a disastrous direction.

Maybe the modern media environment is a huge part of it. We now have 24/7 access to every war, crime, scandal, inequality statistic, political outrage, and cultural conflict happening anywhere. Social-media algorithms also reward anger, fear, and outrage in ways that simply did not exist during the 1980s or 1990s.

There’s also accumulated institutional distrust from Iraq, Afghanistan, the financial crisis, congressional gridlock, money in politics, government shutdowns, the disputes surrounding the 2020 election and January 6, COVID politics, etc.

But even that raises another question.

America went through the Great Depression and WWII, which were vastly more catastrophic than Iraq or the Great Recession, yet institutional trust eventually became extremely high afterward.

Maybe the difference was that Americans eventually developed a clear shared narrative:

“We survived the Depression, defeated fascism, came home victorious, built a booming economy, expanded the middle class, and made life better.”

Something similar could theoretically have developed after 2008:

“We survived the financial collapse, avoided another depression, reformed Wall Street, expanded healthcare, brought unemployment back down, killed bin Laden, expanded civil rights, and continued advancing technologically.”

And another version could theoretically have developed after COVID:

“We survived a once-in-a-century pandemic, rapidly developed vaccines, recovered millions of jobs, brought inflation back down without mass unemployment, finally left Afghanistan, rebuilt infrastructure, invested in domestic manufacturing and clean energy, expanded labor protections, and continued advancing technologically and medically.”

But neither became a broadly shared national narrative.

Today, even when something goes relatively well, Americans often can’t agree that it was a success.

One side sees the ACA as major progress; another sees government overreach.

One side sees tighter financial regulation after 2008 as necessary reform; another sees excessive regulation.

One side sees COVID vaccines as a triumph of science; another focuses on mandates and government restrictions.

One side sees industrial and climate investment as rebuilding American productive capacity; another sees excessive federal spending and intervention.

One side sees the post-COVID economy as an impressive recovery and soft landing; another focuses on inflation and permanently higher prices.

One side sees leaving Afghanistan as finally ending a failed 20-year war; another sees the withdrawal as humiliating.

So maybe the problem isn’t simply that America has stopped progressing.

Maybe progress no longer translates into shared national optimism.

And that is what I find interesting.

It seems possible to recognize enormous material, technological, medical, and social progress while also taking seriously concerns about democracy, civil liberties, extreme inequality, concentrated political power, polarization, gridlock, and failures of both major parties.

Those ideas don’t necessarily contradict each other.

So why do you think Americans have been so much less optimistic about the country over the past decade than during the more optimistic periods of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s?

Is it mainly inequality and concentrated economic power? Political polarization? Gridlock? Social media? Declining social cohesion? Housing affordability? Cultural change? Loss of trust in institutions? Or something deeper psychologically?

And if many aspects of American life really have improved, what would actually need to change for Americans to feel broadly optimistic about the country again?

Edited 1 hour ago by Hardkill

[Leo Gura]

Rising income inequality.

Capitalism is gutting the middle class more and more to make more billionaires, and then those billionaires are using that wealth to corrupt government even more.

It is hard to be optimistic when capitalism keeps getting more toxic and there is no solution in sight.

Edited 1 hour ago by Leo Gura

[Lyubov]

Because there is an economic drought but every idiot with a mouthpiece is shouting at you that you suck and are lazy if you're not rich. It's a weirdly perverse and conflicted belief system that the average American views their life and success through. People would actually be happier if they were simple poor as dirt and had clarity of mind and understanding why the world the way it is. Simple poor happy folk. Instead in a perverse way the average American clings to judgement, blames themselves and looks to bully people bellow themselves in order to feel better about how shit poor and stupid they are. 

Edited 1 hour ago by Lyubov

[Ulax]

Long term employment insecurity 

[Leo Gura]

36 minutes ago, Ulax said:

Long term employment insecurity 

Oh, you will be employed. You will just be paid shitily for it.

[Hardkill]

45 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Rising income inequality.

Capitalism is gutting the middle class more and more to make more billionaires, and then those billionaires are using that wealth to corrupt government even more.

It is hard to be optimistic when capitalism keeps getting more toxic and there is no solution in sight.

Yeah, I get that. 
 

However, that’s always been part of the modern American culture or unchecked capitalism, and like you said before, people in this country have been so addicted to it that they believe that American capitalism is like God’s greatest gift to the country and to the rest of the world. Most Americans believe that’s part of the beauty of American exceptionalism.

So, why aren’t most Americans happy with all of that and still believe in the American dream being possible like they were or did during the presidencies of Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, and Obama?

Also, what about people like Obama saying “Hope and Change”, “Yes, we can!”, “we’ll get through this”, or people like Biden and Bernie Sanders saying “I’ve never been more optimistic in my life about the future” and that “the youngest generations of our country today, who are the future of our country, are the least racist and the most progressive our country has ever had”.

I’ll admit that I said before on here that I thought that maybe the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s, or 1990s were the “good old days.” Now, I’ve been reconsidering that. After learning so much more about what we have had since the mid 2010s compared to what we had anytime before that, I don’t think I would want to live in the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s, or 1990s. I definitely wouldn’t want to live in the aughts either. 
 

As you’ve mentioned before, the 2010s and 2020s have had so many positive things happen that didn’t happen during the mid to late 1900s or the aughts. 
 

 

[Hardkill]

Also, most Americans don’t trust or believe in the government, especially since the election of Reagan in 1980.
 

They trust the private sector and business more and praise billionaires and corporate business leaders for being the “smartest and hardest working people in the world” who deserve to enjoy what they’ve earned and they know what is best for the economy and for the country. That’s part of what makes America so great, right?

So, why do people care that the government is being corrupted by billionaires and corporations?

I mean I wish most people in the country cared enough about this extreme economic inequality and extreme corporate power, but now I am not sure that they do.

Edited 4 minutes ago by Hardkill