Joe Biden’s Weird Perception Problem

Run the numbers, as the election year begins, and life in this country looks to be getting less bleak, more studded with possibility. In 2022, the U.S. recovered all the jobs lost during the pandemic. In the year since, unemployment has stayed below four per cent, and the economy is now performing more strongly than that of every other wealthy nation, including China. Gaps that had seemed permanently wide began to close. The post-pandemic recovery reversed about a quarter of the growth in wage inequality that had taken place in the previous four decades, and the wealth of Black and Hispanic families grew by sixty-one per cent and forty-seven per cent, respectively, between 2019 and 2022, significantly outpacing the thirty-­one-per-cent increase for white families. Major, unprecedented bills became law—the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act—committing the country to an expansive building program, much of it in beleaguered regions, designed to accelerate the green transition. The progress isn’t all linear—we are producing an immense amount of gas and oil. But scan the country and you will catch glimpses of what might be an extraordinary transformation. In South Dakota, of all places, eighty-four per cent of in-state electricity is now generated by renewable resources.