OP-ED by Steve Beaman
For nearly fifty years, a certain kind of politician has been standing behind a podium to announce that America is exhausted, the planet is expiring, capitalism is collapsing, and ordinary people cannot possibly be trusted to solve anything without a federal program, a federal agency, and a federal pamphlet explaining how to fill out the federal application.
The faces change. The hair changes. The predicted catastrophe changes. But the message remains remarkably consistent: You cannot do it. The problem is too big. The system is too powerful. The future is too frightening. Fortunately, we are here to manage your decline.
Jimmy Carter delivered the cardigan-sweater version. Al Gore brought charts. Bernie Sanders added arm movements. Together, they represent the Mount Rushmore of the Can Do Not Caucus, although building that monument would undoubtedly require an environmental impact study, a prevailing wage agreement, and approximately seventeen years of community hearings. Jimmy Carter’s famous 1979 crisis of confidence speech never actually used the word malaise, but America got the message. The country had lost its way. Energy was scarce. Confidence was collapsing. The future required sacrifice, restraint, and perhaps turning down the thermostat while wearing a sweater.
Then Ronald Reagan arrived with a radically different proposition: America was not finished. He did not deny the problems. He rejected the idea that the problems were stronger than the people confronting them. That distinction is everything.
Doomers see a problem and immediately calculate how much freedom must be surrendered to manage it. Builders see a problem and begin looking for tools.
The energy shortage was supposed to teach Americans to accept permanent scarcity. Instead, innovators developed new extraction technologies, renewable energy systems, more efficient vehicles, better batteries, and entirely new industries. Apparently, nobody told the engineers that despair was mandatory.
Then came Al Gore, equipped with a slide presentation large enough to frighten every schoolchild in the Western Hemisphere. Gore deserves credit for helping make environmental issues part of public conversation. But the doomer formula soon became familiar: take a legitimate problem, select the most terrifying possible projection, remove all possibility of human adaptation, and present the resulting nightmare as unavoidable unless political leaders receive extraordinary new powers immediately.
There is always a deadline. We have ten years to act. Then eight. Then five. Then, somehow, ten more. The apocalypse has been rescheduled so many times that it should be managed through Outlook.
Human beings, however, stubbornly refuse to behave like helpless figures in a government spreadsheet. Farmers adapt. Engineers invent. Markets respond. Entrepreneurs take risks. Scientists discover better methods. Consumers change what they buy. Entire technologies emerge that no central planner anticipated.
The doomer’s greatest analytical error is treating people as motionless objects.
If a problem is projected to become severe in thirty years, doomers assume that eight billion human beings will spend the next three decades staring at it like deer caught in headlights. Nobody will innovate. Nobody will adapt. Nobody will discover anything. We will simply wait patiently for the forecast to become reality.
That is not how humanity works.
Then there is Bernie Sanders, America’s most energetic spokesman for the proposition that America no longer works. Bernie has been delivering variations of the same speech for decades: billionaires are taking everything, corporations are destroying everything, workers are receiving nothing, and Denmark is apparently accepting applications.
His solution to nearly every concentration of power is to concentrate more power in Washington. This is a little like treating a fear of bears by purchasing a larger bear. Bernie looks at successful businesses and sees exploitation. Builders look at businesses and ask what they created, whom they employ, which problems they solve, and how they might be improved.
That does not mean markets are perfect. They are not. Neither are corporations, governments, unions, universities, nonprofits, political parties, or people. But the answer to imperfect human institutions is not to construct one enormous institution run by humans and declare it perfect.
The modern doomer is not merely pessimistic. He is strangely offended by optimism. Suggest that technology may solve an environmental problem, and you are denying science. Suggest that entrepreneurs might create prosperity, and you are defending billionaires. Suggest that people can make intelligent decisions without federal supervision, and you may be accused of threatening democracy itself.
For doomers, confidence is suspicious because confident people are difficult to control. Builders are even worse. Builders do not wait for permission to imagine a better future. They experiment. They fail. They adjust. They learn. Then they try again. The great divide in American politics is no longer simply left versus right. It is increasingly Doomers versus Builders. Doomers believe our best years are behind us. Builders believe tomorrow can be better than today if we make it happen. Doomers ask, what if everything goes wrong? Builders ask, What can we do to make it go right? Doomers measure the danger. Builders design the solution. Doomers demand that we lower our expectations. Builders raise the ceiling.
We should take serious problems seriously. We should protect the environment, confront poverty, restrain corruption, widen opportunity, and insist that powerful institutions remain accountable. But seriousness is not the same as surrendering. Fear can alert us to danger. It is terrible at building a future.
America was not built by people who believed every problem required permission from Washington. It was built by people who crossed oceans, opened shops, invented machines, cultivated land, created industries, organized communities, and occasionally ignored experts who assured them that their ideas would never work.
The doomers have been predicting the end for half a century. The Builders have been too busy preventing it to notice.
