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The titular question is I think an understated part of two debates I’ve touched on in this newsletter before: the “vibecession” debate over whether the economy is ‘good’ and how we would know and what we should think or do about it, and the fascism debate, which I have spent less time on because the answer has been obvious for a long time and much of the “it isn’t fascism” side generally argued from their own resentment of liberals rather than anything substantive. In the “vibecession” case, if you buy that it is (or was) a vibecession (I think this is overstated), you’ve got selfish Americans blowing up the global order over the price of eggs. In the fascism debate, well, you have Americans abiding and abetting fascism.

It’s not hard to construct an emotional argument, though not really a historical one, for a Worse America. We elected– the second time with an actual majority– Donald Trump thanks to a combination of hate by his supporters and indifference by enough people in the middle. Our major exports are oil and death and one of our big growth industries is sports betting. For the love of God, they’re making a movie that tries to find “the gray area” in Ebenezer Scrooge, the embodiment of mean selfishness. Johnny Depp stars.

Yet obviously the American past was not a more moral one, speaking generally. People put Andrew Jackson on Trump’s level– his genocidal authoritarianism, disregard for democratic government, sure. At risk of being polemical I think you could put Jefferson there too. He wrote well, he thought deeply– he also paved the way for generations of genocide out west. How much does it matter to the rest of the world if he expressed ultimately meaningless discomfort with slavery? How much should it matter even in our assessment of him?