About a year ago, some asshole with a blog argued that there was a great crankiness affecting the U.S. Said asshole came up with some possible explanations:

1. Buying a house is expensive: due to interest rates, the difference between buying a house in April 2022 and August 2022 is about $1,000/month on a $400,000 house.
2. The rents are too damn high. There are several reasons why this is happening, including price collusion, but, for renters, much of their wage increases are pass-throughs to their landlords.
3. Business rents are too high. Not only would this make business owners cranky, but many businesses are closing up because they can’t afford large rent increases, making things uglier. This also feeds into a sense that people who are running profitable businesses are getting the shaft (unfairly, if that needs to be added).
4. The ongoing crapification of, well, everything. While the article linked above describes how a tight labor market makes it harder to provide customer service, that’s not the only factor. The need to not only have high profits, but annually increasing profits, means that companies aren’t ‘cutting fat’, they’re cutting into muscle and bone. As Cory Doctorow has noted, enshittification (sensu strico and just general lousy service and products) is a dominant feature of, again, everything.
5. COVID, part I: 1.1 million Americans died from COVID, and hundreds of thousands of those deaths were needless. The U.S. has not come to grips with this (and if it ever does, it will take decades).
6. COVID, part II: a subset of people are either worried about COVID, or suspect they should be worried. At the same time, others feel abandoned by society. General crankiness all around.
7. Incipient fascism and theocracy: most normies don’t like to think about politics very much, and they don’t like having to be on ‘constant alert’ (for lack of a better phrase). For example, normies in Ohio wanted to legalize pot, and now the Republican-dominated legislature is attempting to prevent that. It’s exhausting and demoralizing. MOAR CRANKY.

Well, Paul Waldman adds a couple of good hypotheses for the Great Crankiness (boldface mine):

As much as my job as an analyst is to take politics apart and perform a kind of non-statistical multivariate regression in which all the different factors at play are assessed and compared for their various effects on the outcomes this system produces, I’m increasingly leaning toward the conclusion that the details mattered less than the sentiment, that we need to pull back and consider the pervasive sourness that envelopes the country.

That sourness has component parts to it, but what matters is the way they have all added up to a general ill feeling. You can date it back as far as you like, but the prime suspect is the covid pandemic, a trauma that still profoundly affects us. That’s true not just for those who lost family members or businesses, or whose kids basically lost a year of schooling, but for everyone, the way it blanketed the country in misery and left us at each other’s throats…

Then there was inflation, and then there’s the way contemporary media has us all standing in front of a firehose of outrage and contentiousness with our mouths open, leaving us convinced that the world is full of hatefulness and our fellow citizens are terrible. Add that to the multitude of annoyances of everyday life, and you have a recipe for a surly public…

This is one of the dilemmas of modernity: Our expectations are constantly being reset in ways that often prevent us from appreciating the good things — or at least the better things — we have, and instead lead us to focus on what’s unpleasant and irritating, even when it’s less than catastrophic…

Enshittification is everywhere, often (but not always) driven by technology. Paying with a tap of a card or phone is great, but why am I being asked to give a tip at a freaking convenience store? It’s incredible that I never have to ask for directions since the magical rectangle in my pocket can tell me how to get where I’m going. But every time I ask it to, I think of how all my movements are being tracked and that information bought and sold, and I feel just a little angry.

The term has caught on because it captures so well something we can all see and have experienced. But it hasn’t really been thought of as a political force, and maybe it should be…

This has been taken as evidence of the genius of Trump’s campaign, the abysmal failure of Harris’s, or evidence of a lasting philosophical shift in the electorate. But it may be better understood as showing that there was something deep and elemental thrumming under the election, afflicting Americans wherever they were, and it had very little to do with which ads were aired or how many doors were knocked on or which slogan tested better than which other slogan — or, for that matter, anything connected to ideology.

If Waldman is right, then the political question is if the lingering effects of the COVID pandemic restrictions combined with continuing enshittification will be enough to weaken the pro-fascist alliance. Trump et alia certainly won’t do anything to stop enshittification in a meaningful way, and there are always new crises and problems. On the other hand, the professional Democratic opposition is (for now) fundamentally opposed to ‘negative’ politics, and that’s what Waldman’s hypothesis requires: Democrats have actively to convince people things are still bad. My hunch, unfortunately, is that the professional Democrats will fall short because their usual instinct is to stay silent and hope an increasingly pro-fascist media will do the work for them. That means some awful event will have to stop Republicans.

And that’s not something I’m looking forward to at all.