#national-mood

#national-mood

The cycle of dread and panic, of being driven to the edge at full speed before someone slams the brakes, harms our nervous systems, and has the potential to break our spirits.

Younger generations have lost faith in American institutions due to nearly two decades of economic turmoil, which has led to a significant rise in populism across the United States.

LaBeouf hasn't anchored a box-office hit in more than a decade, and little of his 2020s art-house work has drawn buzz. The most notable thing he's starred in lately was a clip of him on a podcaster's couch, hunched and diminished, talking about his fear of gay people.

Jefferson's words on equality are often seen as self-evident, yet they fail to encompass enslaved individuals, women, and other marginalized groups, revealing a significant contradiction.

Starting next month, the cost of renouncing your U.S. citizenship will go down dramatically - a boon for people already shouldering the burden of paying for a major overseas move. Anyone wishing to formally shed their American citizenship is required to obtain a form called a Certificate of Loss of Nationality, and right now it comes with a whopping $2,350 fee. In April, that fee will drop by 80% to $450.

A record high of adults—80 percent—believes that Americans are divided on the most important values. National pride, trust in government, and confidence in institutions are near record lows. The Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz says the United States hasn't been this divided since the Civil War. Nearly half of Americans think another civil war is likely in their lifetime.

Political orthodoxy tells us that younger voters tend to be more progressive on issues like immigration. But in recent years, Europe has seen anti-migrant parties surge in the polls and gain youth support across the continent. In Norway, for example, survey data shows that 24 percent of young people favour limiting immigration "to a large extent" and 23 percent "to some extent."

The number of Americans who anticipate they will have "high-quality lives" in five years' time has dropped to a nearly two-decade low, according to a poll released Tuesday. Around 6 in 10 people surveyed said they expected their lives would be significantly better in the future than today. That is about nine percentage points lower than during the height of the covid-19 pandemic, according to Gallup, which began measuring Americans' sense of optimism in 2008.

As authoritarianism accelerates - as government-sanctioned violence becomes more overt in immigration enforcement, in policing, in the open deployment of federal force against civilians, and in the steady erosion of civil rights - people are scrambling for reference points. But instead of reckoning with the long and violent architecture of U.S. history, much of this searching collapses into racialized tropes and xenophobic reassurance: This isn't Afghanistan. This isn't Iran or China. This is America. We have rights. This is a democracy. This isn't who we are.

A recent Gallup survey based on more than 20,000 interviews found Americans' optimism about their future personal lives has fallen to a new low. Gallup released findings this week from their National Health and Well-Being Index, which is based on data collected from thousands throughout the four quarters of the year. More than 22,000 interviews were spread across all 50 states and the District of Columbia.