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They should have seen the signs. After years of economic turmoil, public pessimism took hold. Citizens had lost faith in their government. Their leaders seemed old and out of touch. As the political system began to break down, citizens despaired of the possibility of real social change. Anxiety, depression and substance abuse soared. Life expectancy at birth begin descendingThis is unprecedented in peacetime for an industrialized country.
In response to this, and the daily stress of a failed state that Soviet citizens endured, they began to turn inward. They called it “Domestic Immigration” metaphor for an imagined inner world to which ordinary people could retreat for solace. This spiritual migration took many forms, but for most Soviet people, the cultivation of a strong spiritual autonomy through music, literature, poetry, art, foreign language study, private gardening, or immersion in nature was the only respite from the torture of an aging political bureaucracy that was insensitive to the needs of the people.
Today, Americans face a similar situation. The candidates for the 2024 presidential election are 81 and 78 years old, respectively, making them the oldest candidates in U.S. history. Internal conspiracy— like the secret Politburo — allows Both
Locking up the nomination of the party’s candidate without real democratic review has caused widespread dissatisfaction.
Trump is currently leading in the polls. Trump’s Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has publicly stated statement The former president represents “a threat to democracy as we know it, our institutions, our political culture, all those things that make America great and define us as the oldest democracy on the planet.” First debate was lacklusterand recently Supreme Court ruling A sense of resigned weariness permeated online discussions about Trump’s exemptions for official actions taken during his presidency.
The nihilism that permeates American culture today is the same nihilism that characterized the last decade of the Soviet bloc. After the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, then-Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev Publish At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, U.S. government officials tried to deal with the shortage of masks by: Tell this Noble Lie Wearing a mask is not necessary. Soon after, President Trump downplayed the impact of the epidemic. False Claims A combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin can protect against the coronavirus. Both have sparked countless conspiracy theories.
Trump peddled the biggest conspiracy theory: that Democrats stole the 2020 election through massive fraud. 70% That skepticism reflects a larger trend. In 2024, the Pew Research Center found that “trust in the federal government has remained low over the past several decades,” with only about one fifth Americans say they “trust the government in Washington to do the right thing almost always/most of the time.”
We are also seeing worsening mental health and physical health. According to Gallup, depression rates in the U.S. are at an all-time high, with nearly One third of adults Reported that they had been formally diagnosed with depression at some point in their lifetime. In 2023, approximately 17.8% of Americans said they were currently depressed, up from 10.5% in 2015. Alcohol consumption Increase In recent years, partly due to Epidemic lockdownBut even before 2020, life expectancy at birth in the United States was decline Since 2015, partly reflecting what economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton call “Death of despairThese include excess deaths from alcohol, drug overdoses, and suicide, not only for working-class white men but also for People of Color.
Americans responded to their sense of helplessness with their own internal migration. Disappointment with the political rigidity of Washington exacerbated the trend toward escapism. Romantic and “romantic fantasy” writers such as Colleen Hoover and Sarah J. Maas Today, these novels dominate the bestseller lists with their uplifting happy endings. “At a time when many of us are overwhelmed by external problems that have no real solution, it’s wonderful to return to a world where the main concern is whether A and B can solve their problems in time and have a satisfying relationship without having to worry about their president starting a nuclear war,” wrote
Alex Acks of Book Riot.
The concept of self-care is ubiquitous. In 2022, the global health economy will be worth $5.6 trillionpeople are indulging in yoga retreats, ayahuasca trips, and mindfulness meditation. Today, millions of Americans have downloaded apps like Calm, Headspace Lead them into some kind of temporary calm. “The more dire the economic outlook, the greater the flood,” Laurie Penny reflect
exist Confused, “Public discussion increasingly turns to individual achievement, as if they are desperately trying to make us feel like we still have control over our lives.”
In the face of a broken two-party system, growing partisanship, a highly politicized Supreme Court that ignores serious allegations of ethical misconduct, gerrymandering, the widespread unpopularity of a repeat of the 2020 election, and the possible demise of American democracy as we know it, who wouldn’t want to attend a Vinyasa yoga boot camp at a remote island spa resort and indulge in a blissful beach read? As the poet Audre Lorde once said, explain“Self-care is not self-indulgence, it’s self-preservation.”
But domestic migrants may develop a habit of apathy. A genuine desire to protect themselves from the pressures of an unjust system Promote disengagement and destroy our Hope’s cognitive abilityMore importantly, when the system changes unexpectedly, we may not be prepared to fight for the new world.
Clearly, the challenges facing American democracy are different from those once faced by the Soviet bloc’s autocratic states. Talk of democratic collapse may sound alarmist. But to those who lived in the old socialist states of Eastern Europe, their political systems also seemed permanent. My colleague, anthropologist Alexey Yurczak explain For citizens of the late Soviet Union, “everything was permanent until it ceased to be.” In my own extensive fieldwork in Bulgaria, many men and women born before 1989 told me that they had never considered that they could live under any system other than socialism.
In his satirical novelSonnenallee’s short tailThomas Brusig captures a similar sentiment through the thoughts of the East German protagonist Mario. When faced with the idea that the Berlin Wall might one day disappear, Brusig writes: “This was too incredible for Mario to even imagine. He would never have thought that the Berlin Wall would suddenly disappear.”
Large-scale political upheavals usually come with tantalizing promises, and the end of the Cold War brought the prospect of universal freedom and prosperity. But that was not the case. Instead, Eastern Europeans suffer The recession was longer and deeper than the Great Depression of the 1930s. For most people, it brought with it sharply rising inequality, extreme poverty, and the transfer of once collectively owned property toThey will starveOligarchs. A popular joke in the 1990s was: “What’s the worst thing about communism? What happens after communism.”
Those who had most successfully cultivated their inner refuge found themselves in disbelief at the sudden collapse and the changes that followed. Rather than helping to rebuild a free society, they were swept into it by outside speculators, greedy criminals, and sometimes corrupt politicians who administered “shock therapy” over which they were powerless to stop.
With so many people locked up in their cells, the transition to democracy and free markets was accomplished quickly and in a decidedly undemocratic way. Anatoly Chubais, Russia’s minister of privatization from 1992 to 1994 Tell In 1999, he told an audience in Washington, D.C., that his efforts to transfer public property into private hands were “Bolshevik,” despite widespread opposition from the public and the government. The powerful new elite suppressed the population because people had become conditioned to apathy.
democracy Indeed deadAs more and more Americans fall into internal exile, we must remember the lessons of the late twentieth century. Political systems can collapse overnight. Protect ourselves as best we can, but remain ready to resist and shape the new world that emerges. Otherwise, we won’t laugh if someone repeats an old joke in 2032: “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to America? What came after it.”
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