Summer of '23

Savoring the good times

It was the summer of Barbenheimer. Everybody realized that they liked outdoor seating and wanted to keep it on city streets. Covid had become a minor irritation, like a flu — nobody bothered to learn the names of the sub-variants. Only weirdos wore masks. Inflation was supposed to lead to a recession and everybody battened down the hatches for that. Instead, employment grew, the economy was back from the pandemic. Even the Russia-Ukraine war was easy to forget about. 

It was a very good time and not least for all the things that weren’t happening. There wasn’t an angry child in the White House. People weren’t at each other’s throats over whether they were masked or not. The unvaccinated weren’t being publicly shamed and excluded from theaters or restaurants. There was a feeling of civility and sanity that had come back into the culture — the spate of cancellations seemed to have abated; the institutions had normalized themselves and in some critical cases gotten their spines back; the center was holding. 

It’s worth savoring the wonders of this quiet moment of civility before the deluge resumes. 

And the fact that the deluge is coming (again) seems to be indisputable. There was something so cozy about watching the GOP debate and seeing these old familiar faces — Chris Christie talking up his record as New Jersey governor (!) — like it was still 2012 and all was right with the world, like nothing had really changed. But appearances were deceptive. The Donald wasn’t just the-elephant-not-in-the-room: The Donald’s contribution to civic discourse was palpable within the debate itself. There was the long period when both Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy were speaking at the same time; there was the new best practices-technique of utterly ignoring the timer and moderator and speaking until some other bully seized the floor; there was the crowd drowning out speakers it didn’t like; there was the presence of Vivek (whose main achievement was a pump-and-dump scheme that he somehow emerged unscathed from and was able to portray as successful entrepreneurship). It wasn’t Hillary-and-Donald looking as if they would start throwing punches and it wasn’t Chris Wallace losing all control of a debate, but the cultural influence was obvious enough. 

And then, more worryingly of course, there were the poll numbers — Biden in trouble; Trump ahead of everybody and now indicted, vindictive, and with January 6th as just another way of endearing himself to his base. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party seemed hopelessly incapable of rising to the challenge. I’ll write more on this sometime next week, but Joe Biden, having crowned his lifetime of public service by stopping the deluge in 2020, instead got greedy — didn’t have it in him to step aside when he was clearly too old and too unpopular to win again. And what was worse, Biden and the Democratic establishment had leaned heavily on the field to keep anybody else mainstream from challenging. It was the now-familiar pattern of the Democratic Party — a pronounced tendency towards heavy-handedly conventional thinking and an almost total disregard for the mood of the populace. (If the belief was that, of course, Hillary could march to a swift coronation in 2016, now it’s that an incumbent president is of course the mark of solidity — and that means paying no attention to Biden’s loss of coherence in public appearances, to the brutal poll numbers concerning his age, to the obvious impossibility of smuggling him through an entire election season against a wily, aggressive opponent.) Meanwhile, Putin seemed to be holding tight in Ukraine, waiting for Trump to return to power: with a complicit partner possibly returning to the White House in 2025, the likely game for him now is simply to wait for the American elections to unfold and then, if Trump returns, to watch Ukraine’s support wither away. 

From a long-term perspective, that was the real narrative of 2023. The Cold War was very much returning and was becoming an intractable state of affairs. Russia had withdrawn from the liberal international community and joined with what was in-a-simpler-time referred to as “the Axis of Evil.” The U.S. seemed to be well on its ways to sever critical economic ties with China and, if China appeared to be less of a belligerent imperial actor than it did at the start of the year, 2022-23 was also the period of time when the rosy-hued globalized vision that emerged in the early ‘90s came decisively to its end. Flash points were starting to break out — most conspicuously in the Sahel. 

At the same time it probably also was the moment when an opportunity was lost to make some real headway in regulating AI. There was some noise about it — by Lina Khan, by the Future of Life Institute — but nobody seemed to have any idea of what practical steps to take. In the idyllic summer of 2023 that seemed like not such an issue. The critic Ted Gioia, whom I really respect, was close to declaring victory — that the AI tools had proved to be overblown, that human creativity was nowhere close to being replaced — but I’m not so optimistic. My strong suspicion is that the AI is getting steadily better, that the ‘intelligent’ work it can carry out is so beyond what humans can achieve on their own that it’s bound to cut a terrible swathe through white-collar and creative professions. 

I suspect also that the darker lessons of the pandemic aren’t entirely beyond us — that 2020 won’t have been the last time the media en masse stopped asking tough questions or thinking critically, when isolation turned into a fact and life became one long Zoom conference. 

But all of that seems far away in 2023: no one wants to think about the pandemic; AI somehow still seems like a science fiction-y sort of problem. These are the kinds of opportunities that get lost in long summers — there isn’t a real reckoning for the pandemic, the Democratic establishment didn’t see the crying need to shake up their roster before 2024, AI guardrails didn’t get set up while there was a sliver of a chance — but that’s not to say that there isn’t much to cherish about this time. It’s a testament to how good life can be when there are sane people in power who are leading from the center; when the economy is functioning; when there is a fairly broad consensus about issues like Ukraine; when the institutions have remembered what they’re there for. Who knows how long any of that will last. But, from the perspective of civic life, 2023 has been the first good year in a long time. It’s worth taking a moment to enjoy it.