Why Does the Right Reject Progress?

The perverse push to make America miserable again

Earlier this week I interviewed Peter Hotez and Michael Mann, authors of a new book, coming out next week, titled “Science under siege.” I’ll be posting that interview Saturday.

Both men are eminent scientists who have played key roles in public policy debates — Hotez over vaccines, Mann over climate change. They wrote their book to fight back against the tide of reaction against science. And this tide of reaction is especially tragic because there is, or should be, a lot of good news right now. In both their fields, reactionaries are trying to strangle technologies that have the potential to make the world a much better place.

As Hotez points out, vaccines in general have done incredible good, and the new mRNA vaccines are a scientific and medical miracle — yet RFK Jr. and his allies are trying to kill both vaccines and thousands, maybe millions of people. Mann, famous for his “hockey stick” chart showing the recent spike in global temperatures, has documented the danger from climate change. Advances in renewable energy, however, have made tackling global emissions far easier than anyone imagined — yet Trump and co. are actively suppressing the adoption of this technological breakthrough.

What I realized after our conversation is that the problem they discuss, of reactionaries who both refuse to accept progress and try to block it, goes well beyond their specific fields, and even science in general. America is now ruled by people who hate progress of all kinds, economic and social as well as scientific. They refuse to acknowledge the progress we’ve made on multiple fronts and are doing their best to reverse it.

Why? I don’t have a full theory, only some scattered thoughts, which I’ll get to at the end. First, though, let me explain the progress I have in mind.

When I talk about progress, my baseline is the early 1990s. Why? At that point the brief euphoria of Morning in America had evaporated. Yes, inflation was down, and the U.S. economy experienced a rapid recovery from the severe double-dip recession of 1979-82. But then we were back to sluggish growth and rising income inequality, plus a pervasive sense that America was being overtaken by other nations.

In 1992 the economist Lester Thurow had a huge bestseller in his book “Head to head: The economic battle among Japan, Europe, and America,” a battle Thurow asserted America was losing. That same year Michael Crichton published “Rising sun,” a novel whose premise was that the future belonged to Japan.

How did that gloom work out? Here’s the percentage growth in real GDP from 1992 to 2024 for Thurow’s three contenders, Japan, the European Union and the United States:

Source: World Bank

Donald Trump says that other countries have been cheating and taking advantage of us all these years. If so, they’ve been doing a remarkably bad job of it.

What this chart doesn’t show, but is easy to document, is that much of this U.S. outperformance can be attributed to U.S. success in adopting new technology and raising productivity, establishing a clear lead over other wealthy nations. The rise of China poses a new threat to U.S. dominance, but that’s another story. What’s clear is that the doom-and-gloom narrative of the early 90s was all wrong.

It's also worth mentioning that the victory we won against inflation in the 1980s has proved durable. In my third primer on stagflation I noted that while year-to-year inflation has fluctuated since the 1980s, expected inflation has remained low and stable, largely because people believe that an independent Federal Reserve won’t let inflation get out of control again:

I’m not saying that everything about the U.S. economy has been great. High and rising inequality means that the benefits of growth have been very unevenly shared. Some regions have been left behind as the shift to a knowledge-based economy has left parts of the heartland — and the people who live there — effectively stranded. All in all, we have far more misery than a rich, successful economy should.

Yet the people in charge won’t acknowledge our past successes. By attacking science, education and, yes, immigration — not to mention trying to force us back to obsolete, polluting energy sources like coal — they are doing their best to undermine the pillars of that success. And by attacking the Fed’s independence, they’re also doing their best to bring back stagflation.

Economics isn’t the only area in which America has defied the pessimism that prevailed a few decades ago.

I often make fun of right-wingers who insist that our major cities are all crime-ridden hellscapes (although this delusion has gotten less funny now that the Trump administration is using it as a justification for effectively invading Los Angeles, Washington and soon, reportedly, Chicago.) But 30 or 35 years ago big cities were a lot closer to that dystopian vision than they are now. Jeff Asher recently posted a chart of murder rates through August in several major cities going back to 1960:

Source: Jeff Asher

Clearly, something went right — very, very right — in America’s big cities. The truth is that we don’t know exactly what went right, but the progress in public safety and, I would say, the general quality of urban life should be undeniable.

You may say, never mind the statistics, cities don’t feel safer. But they do. Try reading descriptions of urban life from the late 1980s or early 1990s — say, Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” published in 1987, a bit early for my comparison, but close enough. The whole plot centers on how dangerous New York was or was perceived to be. A colleague tells the novel’s protagonist, “If you want to live in New York, you’ve got to insulate, insulate, insulate” — that is, separate yourself from the “trenches of the urban wars.” Well, I’m writing this from an outdoor café in New York, watching the pedestrians go by, and I don’t see people trying desperately to insulate themselves from city life.

Why can’t the right accept progress when it happens, and try to build on it? Some of it is special-interest politics, notably fossil fuel interests trying to stop the rise of alternative energy. But a lot of it, I believe, is visceral. I’ve written before that MAGA types see renewable energy as woke and insufficiently masculine: real men burn stuff.

Relatedly, Trump and MAGA see everything in terms of punishment and fear. They can’t accept the idea that America prospered, not by using its power to dominate other nations, but by making and adhering to international agreements that kept world markets open. They can’t accept the idea that we can manage the economy by leaving monetary policy in the hands of technocrats who don’t take Trump’s orders. They can’t accept the idea that cities can be relatively safe, not because armed men are keeping everyone in line, but because most Americans — whatever their national origin or the color of their skin — are decent people more inclined to get along with their neighbors than to hate them.

America isn’t utopia, by a long shot. But we’ve made a lot of progress. Unfortunately, the people now in charge are determined to ruin as much as they can.

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