Americans Haven't Been Satisfied With the Country in 20 Years. What's to Blame?

In January 2004, Mark Zuckerberg was putting the finishing touches on a project called TheFacebook from his college dorm room. The U.S. economy was strong and getting stronger, fueled by a housing boom that was still reaching new heights. Saddam Hussein had just been captured in Iraq, during a war that most Americans still supported. President George W. Bush was notching approval ratings in the low 60s as he prepared to kick off his reelection campaign, and the name "Katrina" was more than 18 months away from becoming synonymous with bureaucratic incompetence.

It may turn out to be the last time Americans thought things were on the right track.

Recent polling data from Gallup suggests a majority of Americans have not been satisfied with the state of the country since that period more than 20 years ago, a remarkable stretch of time that has included seemingly back-to-back crises, social convulsions and disasters, both manmade and natural, that put a spotlight on the roles of government and its citizenry — regardless of which party is in power.

One political scientist points to the financial crisis of 2008, the rise of social media and the Covid-19 pandemic as the three legs of the stool that make up America's 20-year-long sour mood.

"It's historic," Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University, told Newsweek. "It's a confluence of these three major things. You just never had all three things happening in a row before."

Almost three-quarters of Americans are dissatisfied with "the way things are going" in the United States as of April, according to Gallup. Just over half of respondents in January told the pollster they are "very dissatisfied" when faced with the same question.

Recession

The Gallup data shows that while the trend began around 2004, it accelerated and hit its nadir in October 2008, just after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the beginning of a global financial crisis and recession. Just 9% of Americans thought the country was on the right track that gloomy fall.

"That was a big shock that reverberated across the entire country and throughout economic levels," Schiller said."It wasn't limited to blue collar."

The Great Recession hit hard and wide. People across the country, at all levels of income, lost their jobs. The housing market crashed. Millions more lost their homes.

"It took a really long time to recover from that recession," Schiller said. "It was the longest economic downturn that almost everybody had experienced."

A brief rise in satisfaction levels followed in 2009, at the onset of Barack Obama's presidency, though by 2010 the number had receded again, bouncing around in the 20s until late 2016, when the election of Donald Trump briefly sent satisfaction back into the 30s.

By this point, the "lingering hangover" of the recession, as Schiller called it, was wearing off and the economic recovery was in full swing. Despite the deep levels of political polarization during Trump's term, satisfaction levels climbed back to a new relative peak of 45% in February 2020.

"That was kind of a high point in terms of the economy," Lydia Saad, the director of U.S. social research at Gallup, told Newsweek. "It was just after the impeachment. Since then I think it's a combination of one economic issue after another."

Pandemic

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Americans' satisfaction with how things are going fell off a cliff over the course of the long and brutal year of 2020, hitting a Great Recession-level low of 11%. With the Covid pandemic approaching its first anniversary, combined with a contested presidential election and supply chain and labor disruptions wreaking havoc on a country struggling to return to normalcy, just 3% of respondents to Gallup's poll were very satisfied and 8% were somewhat satisfied in January 2021.

"Everywhere you looked there were things you could not control," Schiller, the political scientist, said. "Just as America got a chance to breath and maybe look forward, external factors intervened again."

Social media

Through it all, Americans were seeing the very nature of how they communicate and understand the world around them drastically change with the rise of social media.

"Everyone's happy," Schiller said. "It makes you feel like your life is terrible."

She pointed to reality television shows and celebrity culture adding to the angst, which is then turbocharged by the algorithms that determine what people see online.

"Even if you didn't watch the Housewives of Orange County or New York, you read about it," Schiller said, calling it "lifestyle envy."

"Everybody's looking around out there thinking there's got to be a better life and why don't I have it," Schiller said.

Studies have also repeatedly shown that tech platforms like Facebook, YouTube and, more recently TikTok, lead to more political polarization by segmenting audiences and feeding them content that makes them more reactionary to events in the news.

'Cognitive dissonance'

Notably, the Gallup polling shows that while a majority of Americans routinely say that they are dissatisfied with how things are going in the country, they remain generally satisfied with their personal lives. About 8 in 10 people consistently tell the pollster their rate of personal satisfaction is high, Saad said, a phenomenon that Schiller called an example of cognitive dissonance in action.

"There's always going to be something that people can latch onto as an economic problem," Saad said. "One party or the other is going to be dissatisfied with the leadership in the White House."