| In my new book - The American Dream: Why It's Still Alive... and How to Achieve It - I detail the many ways that academia, Hollywood, the corporate media, and social media try to depict the world as a dumpster fire. Yet, despite our many problems and challenges, most long-term trends are positive. People are living longer than ever. Standards of living have never been higher. Academic attainment has never been greater. (There are more Americans with high school diplomas, college degrees, and post-graduate degrees than ever before.) Violence - despite what you see on the evening news - is in a long-term cycle of decline. Air and water quality have been improving for decades. Median household income and net worth are at record levels. In short, Americans are living longer, healthier, safer, richer, freer lives than ever before. It galls the naysayers, but human progress is an historical fact and an empirical reality. Yet the Enemies of the Dream have a secret weapon. They know that we are hard-wired to be on the lookout for all manner of risks and threats. In a highly uncertain world, the best strategy is to over-worry. And so they play us like a fine Stradivarius, while insisting that they are only trying to help us. Take Al Gore, for example. When his book and documentary An Inconvenient Truth came out 20 years ago, he promised that he was trying to save us not just from a global crisis but from an imminent extinction event. He marshalled all the evidence he could to get us to act... and fast. Global warming wasn't a slow problem. It was a now-or-never problem. We had 10 years, maybe less. There was no time to argue about methods or conclusions. The science - the science of what the future holds - was settled. Two decades later, what sticks with me isn't that Al Gore was wrong about climate change. The planet really has warmed slightly. What sticks with me is that many of the most vivid, time-bound images he used to convey that danger didn't happen on anywhere near the timeline he indicated. The snow of Kilimanjaro didn't vanish within a decade. Glacier National Park didn't lose all its glaciers by 2020. Coastal cities weren't inundated by rising sea levels. Florida wasn't flooded under several feet of water. He had told us an apocalypse was our default future. The bottom line was clear: emissions go up, catastrophe follows, full stop. And this message was hysterically amplified by academia and the media. Millions didn't just suffer from generalized anxiety and a lack of sleep. Some forewent having children, since that would add to society's carbon footprint and only hasten our extinction. Gore - and his allies - made a deliberate rhetorical choice, driven by the belief that people wouldn't act unless they were terrified. And for a while, that strategy worked. It galvanized attention. It moved the issue into the mainstream. But it also planted a time bomb. When deadlines passed and the world didn't end on schedule, skepticism grew - not just about the messaging, but about the problem itself. | 
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