The New Yorker:

And, if not, how can you get some?

By Joshua Rothman

Life in America is deeply anxious. Where are we headed? How bad could it get? Who are we, anyway? What’s particularly scary is that everyone’s scared. Even the people whose candidate just won are frightened—of immigrants, of the future, but also of the rest of us. In a column from before the election, I described a sign planted in a yard on my street; it read “Democrats Are Communists and Terrorists—are you?” The election is over, but the sign remains. So does another, not far from me, showing Trump wielding an AR-15. These signs, which loom over storybook suburban streets in affluent small towns, suggest the degree to which our country has become consumed by fear.

In fearful times, people often see themselves as optimists or pessimists. Being a pessimist can be comforting; if you’re a pessimist, then nothing about the future can surprise you, because you already know it’s going to be bad. The problem with pessimism, however, is that it’s limiting. Pessimism makes it harder to imagine, or really believe in, a better future.

Optimists can sometimes picture that future: in a recent blog post, the economist Alex Tabarrok outlined “the Best-Case Scenario for a Trump Presidency.” (For example, “Trump the developer” could expand the housing supply; he might also “appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head a committee on vaccine policy and, after several years of investigation, write a report.”) Tabarrok isn’t predicting that Trump will do these things; he’s saying only that it would be nice if he did them in place of other things he might do. There are shades of optimism: it’s one thing to have optimistic visions, and another to actually believe that they’ll come to pass. The problem with being a believing optimist is that you may become too selective in your reckoning of good and bad. If the situation is dire enough, then believing in your optimism becomes a kind of denial.

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