Sean Patrick Carlin

This consumption-obsessed world was cemented into place in the 1980s, as Reagan preached laissez-faire economics and figures like Trump made ostentatious wealth aspirational. As Americans were being robbed of true agency and power by an increasingly

This consumption-obsessed world was cemented into place in the 1980s, as Reagan preached laissez-faire economics and figures like Trump made ostentatious wealth aspirational. As Americans were being robbed of true agency and power by an increasingly tilted economic playing field, the illusion of power via consumer choice took the pressure off government to do anything meaningful to unrig the rules. And for the "everywheres," it was a dream come true for the "somewheres" to understand power as buying more -- thus enriching the owner class -- instead of fighting back against the concentrated forces robbing them of higher wages and better working conditions. People had been taught that meaning and purpose came from shopping, only to find themselves working harder than ever to afford the very purchases that were supposed to make them feel free.

- p. 147

Perhaps the reason a higher guaranteed safety net polls well is that voters know, intuitively, that peace of mind comes with more social stitching. A political scientist named Benjamin Radcliff spent his tragically short academic career (he died in 2024 at age sixty) assembling a large set of global data on the relation between a nation's public social benefits and the happiness of the population. His findings were simple and clear. "Citizens find life more rewarding as the generosity of the welfare state increases, [controlling for] economic or cultural conditions," he wrote with colleague Alexander Pacek. In other words, as Radcliff and Pacek put it elsewhere, "the data suggest that maximizing the 'decommodification' provided by the welfare state does indeed help to maximize human happiness.”

As discussed earlier, the nations with the highest rates of self-reported happiness are the countries of Scandinavia -- Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway. These are nations that have universal health care, free childcare, highly subsidized college for qualified students, and generous parental leave from work for parents of young children. And what Radcliff argued, quite convincingly, is that the higher the floor of universal benefits every citizen receives as a right of birth, the greater the sense of cohesion. This is because everyone starts life a few steps up on the ladder, and more life-defining experiences -- such as finding care for your child or finding the right college for your teenager -- feel similar for everyone, no matter your income or social position.

Interestingly, Scandinavia's choice to keep large parts of daily life in the public commons -- shielded from profit-first logic -- hasn't stopped people from getting rich. These countries have more billionaires per capita than the United States and one of the highest shares of millionaires in the world. That produces a higher concentration of wealth than in much of the rest of Europe, yet Scandinavia still has roughly 40 percent less wealth inequality than the United States.

pp. 170–71

And yet, despite this clear hunger for major, power-shifting economic change, many leading Democrats -- and even more in the pundit class -- treat populist leaders like Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani as fringe threats to the party's electoral success. They believe that any pugilistic criticism of corporate power, any policy solution that does more than tweak market rules, and any public-sector effort to stimulate social connection smacks of socialism. This is simply wrong. There's a reason Bernie Sanders is the only national Democrat who can fill stadiums -- and a not insignificant number of people in those stadiums voted for Trump. There is an unmistakable appetite for a politics that not only directly confronts concentrated power, consumerism over citizenship, and government corruption but also offers solutions with real -- not incremental -- impact on the work of restoring dignity and meaning to American life.

Voters chose Trump because they wanted a revolution. But my party doesn't yet seem completely ready to seize this moment. That is tragic, unacceptable, and worth having a fight over.

- p. 261

Grown men gather around the campfire of film noir, running and rerunning films that are seventy-five years old and were made with skill and indifference, or the assumption so heavy in Mitchum's gaze that nothing really matters. . . .

I have tried to stress how far Out of the Past is uninterested in the women and their experience. But it is equally averse to interesting men, so long as they seem to be moody, impervious guys who can get away with their pose for forty years or so. That's how long Mitchum lasted, and how we seem to have forgotten The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973). In that he plays a minor figure in the Boston underworld, a big man physically but a fuckup, who would be wistful to observe Jeff's assurance when set against his own ineptness. But in the famous noir movies our ineptness or the signs of mental illness are covered up as a suave welcoming of death that real outcasts must be offended by. The violence has turned into existential affectation, and we swim along in the myth that no one is hurt. But that detachment may be the breeding ground for a male self-destructiveness that has brought us to a terrible brink.

It's comic now to think of Out of the Past as violent, or having a death wish. We hardly notice what we have become accustomed to and how easily we hold a silk umbrella against damage. Still, in the thirties and the forties, some observers worried over movie violence, and the calm that went with it. But too few appreciated that the damage depended on our not being there, available to be hurt. We said the cobra was not real, or even there. It was a play. So we fell in line with an attitude in which a would-be leader ruminated about how he could shoot someone dead on the street without rebuke. He thought he was in a movie? That seemed childish, but where were we?

It comes to this: In life, I have found few opportunities for behaving like Robert Mitchum. Yet I think his example has urged me sometimes to feel I was hoping to be seen in a noir light. We don't always know how fantasy works. Are there endorphins that kick in? Are there medications for it, or do we prefer to treat it as elemental? Like weather. Is cinema itself bipolar, the dark and the light? It made an adolescent attitude that hurt people around me. And which is not worthy of the kind of imaginative participation in life that I aspire to.

- pages 189–90