The Abyss

MANIFESTO

The New York Times this morning reports that

Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.

In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed that "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track," up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2003.

Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.

These are astonishing data. To be sure, I've felt this way since before the millennium began, but for four out of five Americans to have this pessimistic view shows how monstrous our fall from grace has been.

The real concern, of course, is how we get out of the mess that the poll manifests. Certainly, things won't get any better in the next nine months, and it almost seems too much to hope that a new, and more progressive, administration can get the US out of the slough of despond it currently finds itself in. To be sure, here's hoping, but it took the country a while to get to this nadir. It'll no doubt take some time for it to recover.