In the US and NC, pessimism prevails despite a brightening economy | Opinion

Politicians these days face what stand-up comics call “a tough crowd.”

Like an audience that just won’t laugh, most Americans say they are deeply unhappy with the direction of the nation.

A Jan. 30 NBC News Poll found that 71 percent of Americans think the nation is heading in the wrong direction. The network’s report on the poll said, “We have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-plus-year history of the poll.”

The pessimism may be deeper, but it’s not new. According to Gallup polling, the last time a majority of Americans were satisfied with the direction of the U.S. was in January 2004 (55%).

Two recent state polls found that North Carolinians’ views are in line with the national results. A High Point University poll released in late January and a Meredith Poll released Monday found the percentage of North Carolinians dissatisfied with the nation’s direction at nearly 70 percent.

While the dissatisfaction is clear, the causes aren’t. It could be argued, as President Joe Biden did in his State of the Union speech, that the nation is back on track. The COVID pandemic is waning, inflation is easing, the nation is not at war, wages are rising and unemployment is at a 53-year-low at 3.4 percent

Given the hardships and challenges this nation has faced from wars, the Great Depression, assassinations and social unrest, this hardly seems a time for deep unhappiness with the nation’s direction, yet that’s what the polls show.

Meredith Poll Director David McLennan said political polarization accounts for the persistence of dissatisfaction even as the direction of the nation changes.

“There are several reasons why people are generally pessimistic about the condition of the country, despite facts to the contrary,” McLennan told me. “The most obvious reason is the hyper-polarization that affects the country. When Democrats are in control of government institutions, Republicans and Republican-leaners are dissatisfied with the direction of the country and vice versa.”

McLennan said this is reinforced by cable opinion shows and social media: “Related to the hyper partisanship affecting peoples’ perceptions about how the country is going are the media and political echo chambers that many Americans place themselves in.”

Gallup agrees that political polarization is making people less open to changing their perceptions as situations change, a calcification that helps explain the low presidential approval ratings for former President Donald Trump and now for President Biden.

Gallup said: “U.S. partisans in recent years have become unlikely to approve of a president from the other political party throughout his presidency regardless of the state of the nation or what he has done as president.”

For a historical view of today’s pessimism, I spoke with James Leloudis, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill history professor who studies the South. He said the poll results may be more about mood than logic.

The upheaval and divisions that marked the Trump years, the arrival of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and a spike in inflation have left many people uncertain and uneasy regardless of economic statistics.

“We’ve been through a lot of trauma in the last few years,” he said. “People are still recovering from that trauma and nothing feels quite right.”

Some of the pessimism reflects Republicans reflexively opposing President Biden, he said. But there’s also worry among Democrats about the extent of economic inequality exposed by the pandemic and how to fix it.

“Some of the disillusionment in those polls may be a kind of searching,” he said. “If we are not going back to that inequity, then what is the option?”

If people are unhappy with the direction of the country, they can change it. The problem now is pessimism on both sides about where the country is and a stubborn divide about which way it should go.

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-829-4512, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com