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American Doom Loop: Dispatches from a Troubled Nation, 1980s–2020s
Much of the contemporary crazy can be traced to the 1980s—America of the 2020s is living with the cultural shapeshifting rooted in that decade.
Americans lived in a different reality in 1980: Vermont was the only state that let residents carry a concealed firearm without a permit. Twenty-four states now allow this—and numerous other gun laws have fallen by the wayside. When police were accused of wrongdoing, the default answer from society’s arbiters—courts, politicians, newspaper editors— “The police wouldn’t lie.” Editors steered clear of stories about rape and sexual violence. The word “homeless” wasn’t in common use. The fabric of the middle class had not yet begun fraying.
America of the 2020s is living with cultural shapeshifting rooted in the 1980s. History, of course, is not a snapshot—it’s a film. To understand the United States today, we have to know the 1980s. American Doom Loop chronicles the first part of that moving picture, then brings the story forward.
As a newspaper journalist, Dale Maharidge had a front-row seat to this decade, immersed in disparate worlds. He was in the Philippines during the last days of Dictator Ferdinand Marcos, witnessing the US lose a critical piece of its empire dating to the Spanish–American War; he traveled to Central America where the East-West conflict was playing out by proxy; he smuggled a Salvadoran family marked by death squads, driving them through trackless desert to the US border; he embedded with a group that was a precursor to the Oath Keepers; and he investigated police, who kept trying to get him fired.
Through it all, Maharidge gained an invaluable view of a complicated decade that offers insight into our society today.
Americans lived in a different reality in 1980: Vermont was the only state that let residents carry a concealed firearm without a permit. Twenty-four states now allow this—and numerous other gun laws have fallen by the wayside. When police were accused of wrongdoing, the default answer from society’s arbiters—courts, politicians, newspaper editors— “The police wouldn’t lie.” Editors steered clear of stories about rape and sexual violence. The word “homeless” wasn’t in common use. The fabric of the middle class had not yet begun fraying.
America of the 2020s is living with cultural shapeshifting rooted in the 1980s. History, of course, is not a snapshot—it’s a film. To understand the United States today, we have to know the 1980s. American Doom Loop chronicles the first part of that moving picture, then brings the story forward.
As a newspaper journalist, Dale Maharidge had a front-row seat to this decade, immersed in disparate worlds. He was in the Philippines during the last days of Dictator Ferdinand Marcos, witnessing the US lose a critical piece of its empire dating to the Spanish–American War; he traveled to Central America where the East-West conflict was playing out by proxy; he smuggled a Salvadoran family marked by death squads, driving them through trackless desert to the US border; he embedded with a group that was a precursor to the Oath Keepers; and he investigated police, who kept trying to get him fired.
Through it all, Maharidge gained an invaluable view of a complicated decade that offers insight into our society today.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published April 16, 2024
2 people are currently reading
21 people want to read
About the author
Dale Maharidge
24 books120 followersI'm a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. I've published ten books, including And Their Children After Them, which won the 1990 non-fiction Pulitzer Prize. The most recent is Bringing Mulligan Home/The Other Side of the Good War (PublicAffairs). Before that I released the paperback edition of Someplace Like America/ Tales from the New Great Depression(University of California Press), with a foreword by Bruce Springsteen.
My books are all thematically connected, I believe, rooted in my curiosity about America and who we are as a people. I've documented the economic crisis since the 1980s. For working people, there is no other way to describe it. If you want, check out the afterword I wrote for the paperback of Someplace Like America--I reported in Detroit for it and I found some very interesting things there that raises questions about where we are going as a country.
I spent the first 15 years of my career as a newspaperman, working in Cleveland and Sacramento. I also taught at Stanford University for 10 years, in the Department of Communication.
My books are all thematically connected, I believe, rooted in my curiosity about America and who we are as a people. I've documented the economic crisis since the 1980s. For working people, there is no other way to describe it. If you want, check out the afterword I wrote for the paperback of Someplace Like America--I reported in Detroit for it and I found some very interesting things there that raises questions about where we are going as a country.
I spent the first 15 years of my career as a newspaperman, working in Cleveland and Sacramento. I also taught at Stanford University for 10 years, in the Department of Communication.
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October 27, 2024
If Jefferson Cowie's 2010 book "Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class" covered the beginning of the end, then "American Doom Loop" simply picks up where Cowie left off and chronicles what another four decades of decline hath wrought.
As its title suggests, the subject matter is pretty bleak. I'll be impressed if this book gets more than a few dozen reviews, not because it's bad (it's fantastic) but because it tells the truth - from someone who's spent an entire career in the trenches. I confess to only finding out about Dale Maharidge fairly recently (via my longtime love of Bruce Springsteen's music) despite having more than just a passing interest in this topic. Everyone, American-or-not, should read this book to get a measure of where we are in society today, and where we're headed. (Hint: it's nowhere good, if our collective inaction is any guide).
On the topic of mass murder in America, Maharidge succinctly sums up our growing indifference by contrasting the shock Ohioans felt after Michael Swihart's rampage in 1977 (four died) to 2022, where 647 active shooter incidents (with four or more deaths) took place in the USA. "The shock is no longer from the events themselves but from the indifference, which is more horrifying. We've allowed these massacres to become part of the ordinary background noise of American life."
He covers the nature of homelessness in a manner that is both incisive and terrifying. "One man's story illustrates my point: up until the 1970s he had driven a truck for the [steel] mills [in Youngstown, Ohio]. He lost his job in early middle age. He ended up in Houston, and after a series of menial jobs that didn't pay enough to cover the rent, began living in the woods. He was sane then. By 1995, he'd become a man who babbled. Over my four decades of covering the homeless, I can attest to one certainty: that after one lives on the street for a year, or two years, or three - there is a strong probability that one will become mentally ill. And many by this point will start drinking or using drugs to self-medicate."
Through these stories he covered as a journalist, Maharidge quietly eviscerates the party faithful on both sides of the political spectrum, exposing them largely as hypocrites - driven by a desire to acquire wealth and consolidate their privilege at the expense of the poor and dwindling middle class. "Cheaper housing, not subsidies - is the real answer. Mississippi makes it easy to build while California does not. So called liberal communities in the Democratic stronghold of the Golden State have made it very difficult to construct affordable housing - the inhumane result condemns many of the poor and working class to live in tents and under bridges." He cites examples of Republicans trying to kill the "housing first" program, mandating treatment for substance abuse before putting a roof over anyone's head (which came first, the chicken or the egg?) and of NIMBY Democrats with pro-BLM signs on their lawn and not a single person of colour in their neighbourhood.
Other chapters cover the end of the corrupt US-backed Marcos regime in the Philippines, US-backed violence in Central America, he interviews Vietnam veterans whose rose-coloured glasses came off faster than most, and anti-war protestors from Kent State University. He covers police brutality and corruption, wisely pointing out that our elected officials and public servants only get away with whatever we let them get away with: if the cops are corrupt, it's because we've never held them accountable. He covers the rise of underground far-right agitators in the mid-1980s, foreshadowing the rise of Donald Trump and January 6th.
In one instance, Maharidge wrote an article in 1985 about these far-right groups and how the then-Reagan administration was subtly courting them instead of denouncing them. He interviewed a Holocaust survivor with a numeric code tattooed on her arm, who refused to get it removed because she wanted to keep it as proof for all the Holocaust-deniers out there. This woman stated her belief that America would one day elect a dictator, and that dictator would likely be Republican. (The article was never published, reflecting the editor's disgust with the assertion that the GOP was capable of authoritarianism).
Make no mistake, this is a heavy, heavy read. It's gritty and dark. Like Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" - Dale Maharidge puts a gigantic mirror up to our society, examines its flaws, and our collective ignorance to them. These types of books rarely do well, the most they can accomplish is a cult following. It's a troubling reality that the average person won't give a damn about any of these things until it impacts them personally. You've gotta wonder if it ever will?
The prologue includes a quote from a USMC veteran who served with the author's father in WW2:
"We were fighting the British for our freedom. We fought the Indians to take their land. We fought the Mexicans; we wanted California from the Mexicans and we took it. We've been fighting all our existence. We are aggressive, let's face it."
This book makes you ponder what all that fighting was supposed to be for.
As its title suggests, the subject matter is pretty bleak. I'll be impressed if this book gets more than a few dozen reviews, not because it's bad (it's fantastic) but because it tells the truth - from someone who's spent an entire career in the trenches. I confess to only finding out about Dale Maharidge fairly recently (via my longtime love of Bruce Springsteen's music) despite having more than just a passing interest in this topic. Everyone, American-or-not, should read this book to get a measure of where we are in society today, and where we're headed. (Hint: it's nowhere good, if our collective inaction is any guide).
On the topic of mass murder in America, Maharidge succinctly sums up our growing indifference by contrasting the shock Ohioans felt after Michael Swihart's rampage in 1977 (four died) to 2022, where 647 active shooter incidents (with four or more deaths) took place in the USA. "The shock is no longer from the events themselves but from the indifference, which is more horrifying. We've allowed these massacres to become part of the ordinary background noise of American life."
He covers the nature of homelessness in a manner that is both incisive and terrifying. "One man's story illustrates my point: up until the 1970s he had driven a truck for the [steel] mills [in Youngstown, Ohio]. He lost his job in early middle age. He ended up in Houston, and after a series of menial jobs that didn't pay enough to cover the rent, began living in the woods. He was sane then. By 1995, he'd become a man who babbled. Over my four decades of covering the homeless, I can attest to one certainty: that after one lives on the street for a year, or two years, or three - there is a strong probability that one will become mentally ill. And many by this point will start drinking or using drugs to self-medicate."
Through these stories he covered as a journalist, Maharidge quietly eviscerates the party faithful on both sides of the political spectrum, exposing them largely as hypocrites - driven by a desire to acquire wealth and consolidate their privilege at the expense of the poor and dwindling middle class. "Cheaper housing, not subsidies - is the real answer. Mississippi makes it easy to build while California does not. So called liberal communities in the Democratic stronghold of the Golden State have made it very difficult to construct affordable housing - the inhumane result condemns many of the poor and working class to live in tents and under bridges." He cites examples of Republicans trying to kill the "housing first" program, mandating treatment for substance abuse before putting a roof over anyone's head (which came first, the chicken or the egg?) and of NIMBY Democrats with pro-BLM signs on their lawn and not a single person of colour in their neighbourhood.
Other chapters cover the end of the corrupt US-backed Marcos regime in the Philippines, US-backed violence in Central America, he interviews Vietnam veterans whose rose-coloured glasses came off faster than most, and anti-war protestors from Kent State University. He covers police brutality and corruption, wisely pointing out that our elected officials and public servants only get away with whatever we let them get away with: if the cops are corrupt, it's because we've never held them accountable. He covers the rise of underground far-right agitators in the mid-1980s, foreshadowing the rise of Donald Trump and January 6th.
In one instance, Maharidge wrote an article in 1985 about these far-right groups and how the then-Reagan administration was subtly courting them instead of denouncing them. He interviewed a Holocaust survivor with a numeric code tattooed on her arm, who refused to get it removed because she wanted to keep it as proof for all the Holocaust-deniers out there. This woman stated her belief that America would one day elect a dictator, and that dictator would likely be Republican. (The article was never published, reflecting the editor's disgust with the assertion that the GOP was capable of authoritarianism).
Make no mistake, this is a heavy, heavy read. It's gritty and dark. Like Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" - Dale Maharidge puts a gigantic mirror up to our society, examines its flaws, and our collective ignorance to them. These types of books rarely do well, the most they can accomplish is a cult following. It's a troubling reality that the average person won't give a damn about any of these things until it impacts them personally. You've gotta wonder if it ever will?
The prologue includes a quote from a USMC veteran who served with the author's father in WW2:
"We were fighting the British for our freedom. We fought the Indians to take their land. We fought the Mexicans; we wanted California from the Mexicans and we took it. We've been fighting all our existence. We are aggressive, let's face it."
This book makes you ponder what all that fighting was supposed to be for.
April 13, 2025
Amazing
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