"How America Ends: A tectonic demographic shift is under way. Can the country hold together?"

Medieval demographics, Ljubljana.

A long read, a good read. The Census Bureau projects that America will become “minority white” by 2045. If I'm lucky enough to still be around at the age of 85, I'll raise a glass.

How America Ends: A tectonic demographic shift is under way. Can the country hold together? by Yoni Appelbaum (The Atlantic)

Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since, that has changed.

“Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage,” Trump told the crowd at his reelection kickoff event in Orlando in June. “They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.” This is the core of the president’s pitch to his supporters: He is all that stands between them and the abyss ...

Maybe inequality causes suicide, drug abuse and mental illness. Maybe it's the "American Dream." Maybe both.

A magisterial paragraph by Frank Rich at The New Yorker.

In 2008, America Stopped Believing in the American Dream

That loose civic concept known as the American Dream — initially popularized during the Great Depression by the historian James Truslow Adams in his Epic of America — has been shattered. No longer is lip service paid to the credo, however sentimental, that a vast country, for all its racial and sectarian divides, might somewhere in its DNA have a shared core of values that could pull it out of any mess. Dead and buried as well is the companion assumption that over the long term a rising economic tide would lift all Americans in equal measure. When that tide pulled back in 2008 to reveal the ruins underneath, the country got an indelible picture of just how much inequality had been banked by the top one percent over decades, how many false promises to the other 99 percent had been broken, and how many central American institutions, whether governmental, financial, or corporate, had betrayed the trust the public had placed in them. And when we went down, we took much of the West with us. The American Kool-Aid we’d exported since the Marshall Plan, that limitless faith in progress and profits, had been exposed as a cruel illusion.

Meanwhile at The Economist, the reviewer isn't sure this book's argument holds. For me, even if inequality cannot be proven to cause societal illness and disarray, it's sure not helping the situation, is it?

Play it again, Frank.

 ... just how much inequality had been banked by the top one percent over decades, how many false promises to the other 99 percent had been broken ...

Best follow the money.

The crack-up: Does inequality cause suicide, drug abuse and mental illness?

In “The Inner Level”, the authors of “The Spirit Level” argue that it does

 ... In a paper published in 2010, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson found that about one in ten people in Japan and Germany suffered some form of mental illness in the year they studied, compared with one in five Britons and Australians and one in four Americans. If economic ups and downs are the source of such troubles, they seem to have torn at the minds of citizens in some societies more than others.

The key to the puzzle, Ms Pickett and Mr Wilkinson argue in their new book, “The Inner Level”, is inequality. When the distribution of income spreads apart, a society begins to malfunction, affecting the mental health of everyone living within it.

Curse of the social animal

The pair have addressed the subject before. In “The Spirit Level”, a bestseller released in 2009, they sought to demonstrate a link between high levels of inequality and all manner of social ills, from poor health and obesity, to crime and violence, to educational failure and low social mobility. The more unequal a society, they wrote, the worse it was likely to perform on such measures. Indeed, the social damage wrought by inequality might be severe enough that the rich in less equal societies would benefit from efforts to even things up. The book attracted its share of criticism, as theories of everything tend to, in particular for confusing correlations with causality. Nonetheless, it helped to inspire a burgeoning debate about the costs of widening inequality.

“The Inner Level” seeks to push that debate forward, by linking inequality to a crisis of mental health. This time the authors’ argument focuses on status anxiety: stress related to fears about individuals’ places in social hierarchies. Anxiety declines as incomes rise, they show, but is higher at all levels in more unequal countries—to the extent that the richest 10% of people in high-inequality countries are more socially anxious than all but the bottom 10% in low-inequality countries. Anxiety contributes to a variety of mental-health problems, including depression, narcissism and schizophrenia—rates of which are alarming in the West, the authors say, and rise with inequality.

Manifestations of mental illness, such as self-harm, drug and alcohol abuse and problem gambling, all seem to get worse with income dispersion, too. Such relationships seem to apply within countries as well as between them. Damaging drug use is higher in more unequal neighbourhoods of New York City, in more unequal American states and in more unequal countries. The authors emphasise that it is a person’s relative position rather than absolute income that matters most ...

As George Carlin said, “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

For example.

At this precise moment, my mother's long-term care insurance provider suggests that she's benefited so greatly from the care available for her in assisted living, for which the insurer reimburses us, that it is considering erasing the benefit. It isn't yet a "done" deal, and there may be a satisfactory resolution, though not until after significant stress for all of us.

This wouldn't occur in Norway, Denmark or Sweden, would it? I'm starting to get resentful about that drunken, errant stork.

After I Lived in Norway, America Felt Backward. Here’s Why.

A crash course in social democracy, by Ann Jones (The Nation)

... Norway, Denmark, and Sweden practice variations of a system that works much better than ours. Yet even the Democratic presidential candidates, who say they love or want to learn from those countries, don’t seem know how they actually work.

More American wet dreams.

Maybe if we had the right religion, the right immigrants and the right firearms, this wouldn't seem so obvious.

The American dream has become a burden for most; As wages stagnate and costs rise, US workers recognise the guiding ideal of this nation for the delusional myth it is, by Gary Younge (The Guardian)

 ... For underpinning that faith in a better tomorrow was an understanding that inequality in wealth would be tolerated so long as it was coupled with a guarantee of equality of opportunity. In recent years they have seen both heading in the wrong direction – the gap between rich and poor has grown even as possibilities for economic and social advancement have stalled.