“A whole bunch of everything for both, especially going wrong,” said a friend who didn’t want to be named, and declined to give examples. I had gone to our local place and asked people to name one thing they think is going right in America and one thing going wrong.

She views the world from a resigned distance, I think, and doesn’t see any point in going over its problems.

Listening, corruption, inflation

Not everyone felt like her. John, a retired retail manager, thought “We’re headed in the right direction. All we need is people coming together to support each other.” He was the most positive person I talked to.

But that required a change. “Everyone wants to argue, everyone wants to fight,” he said. People should listen to each other. We aren’t always right and other people aren’t always wrong. “Stop and ponder, and think sometimes they might have a great point.”

His example of one thing going wrong was “We’re too lenient on our kids. We need to develop discipline so they can be better contributors to society.”

“We’re not being told the whole truth,” said Chrissy, who runs karaoke night. (Note to new journalists: Have the sense not to go down to the bar to interview people on karaoke night. Parts of your interview will go: “What?” “What?” “What?” “What?”.)

There’s a lot of hidden corruption that goes “all the way down,” she said, mentioning Congress’s insider trading, its members’ loyalty to Israel, as if they were dual citizens, and the elites’ sexual deviance, which “goes deeper than just Epstein.”

She thinks that it’s good, knowing more than we would have known in the past, but asked, “Where’s the action?” She doesn’t see anything being done in response.

“I was liberal liberal liberal,” she said, but the government’s lines during COVID and the subsequent unraveling of parts of the official narrative made her suspect the government couldn’t be trusted. Now, “I feel better for the tin foil hat people. They may end up being right.”

“Prices,” said J.P. He works in a tire store and could list, with specific numbers, how much more staples like gas and food were now costing his family. His wife works shifts as an evening bartender and I think another job as well. Inflation only makes their lives harder. He didn’t have an answer for what’s going right.

The Constitution, social media, extremism

“There are incredible things happening every day,” said Eddie, a man in his mid-20s who’s worked as a teacher and actor. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “incredible job” was one, an example he hoped spread across the country.

“Some people are fighting what the Constitution says,” he said. “So people say, ‘That’s legal, so it’s OK.’” By “legal,” he means Trump policies that seem to be obviously unconstitutional.

He also worried about the growth of AI. “AI has made people smarter,” he said, “making people dumber, if that makes sense?” I said it did. “It’s a crutch for people.” He gave several examples of AI giving people bad information or leading them into bad decisions.

Asking to name something going right, Tiffany, a restaurant manager, paused and then said, “I don’t really have an answer for that — prices are too high, people aren’t nice to each other.”

She is very down on social media. “Social media ruined the world.” When she was young, a fight on the playground ended when recess ended. Now, “everyone goes to their phone,” creating “a lot of bullying, not much social interaction.” She did like the recipes and the cleaning tips, though.

My friends Greg and Julia, quoted often before, had ideas. They’re about 40, he a computer whiz and she a whiz marketer in a tech company.

“Before,” said Greg, holding his hands a few inches apart, “we had an acceptable range of opinions that was fairly central. Now,” he said, holding his hands a couple feet apart, “we have extreme positions” that are getting more of a hearing than they had in the past.

That’s both good and bad. Bad because most people on the extremes just talked to each other in “echo chambers.” But good because this new range of views is “making people skeptical about accepted ideas. They can now say ‘That’s b.s.’ More people are open to a range of interesting ideas. A lot of it is good in the end.”

Julia said that “younger people seem to care more” than older people, “feel more empathy for other people.” She thought they are making better decisions, for themselves and the world, than their parents.

Precarity and alienation

Like my friend, several people didn’t want to answer, because they could only think of things going wrong and couldn’t bring themselves to talk about them.

This surprised me, because an interviewer can count on people wanting to criticize and complain. I’m guessing, judging from other conversations there and observations elsewhere, and my own feelings as well, that a lot of people share my friend’s feeling of distance and resignation.

Which makes sense. Most of the people at the bar live with some degree of what economists call “precarity,” even if they have middle class incomes, and many have jobs so precarious they could find themselves unemployed without warning when they’re already living paycheck to paycheck.

Investment in public life requires some economic security and some belief that your voice matters. Whether that’s true is a question. As friends at the bar have observed, the wealthier are not as secure as they think and their voice not as important as they think. They depend just as much as the people at the bar on the actions of others.

Many Americans, like some of my companions at our local place, feel so alienated from American public life they can’t rouse themselves to complain. And not irrationally. There’s no point.

The world does what it does whatever they do or say. Their good doesn’t figure in its calculations. They have other things to do in their lives, like make a living when the prices keep rising.

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