Are the Good Times Really Over?

A prescription for George Strait, Gen Z, and the rest of us: Hope.

Last week I went to the largest concert in the history of the United States. Nineties country legend George Strait played all the hits, along with a cover of Merle Haggard’s 1982 “Are the Good Times Really Over.” I won’t subject you to the whole song, but here’s the chorus:

Are we rolling down hill
Like a snowball headed for hell?
With no kind of chance
For the flag or the liberty bell?

Haggard published his Make America Great Again anthem in 1982, during the Reagan administration. But 42 years later, its pessimism resonated with most of the 110,000 people in Texas A&M’s Kyle Field. Country music fans, along with much of Gen Z, are pretty pessimistic these days.

In 2004, between Merle Haggard’s 1982 whining and George Strait’s sampling of it, George W. Bush won his second election for the presidency of the United States.

Liberals lost it. From their perspective, they had swallowed down a moderate, foreign policy hawk in hopes of turfing out Bush, who they considered a barely legitimate president that had launched an illegitimate war. It didn’t work. Bush won decisively, and it would be another seven years before the United States military left Iraq.

Into the undertow, below the tide of liberal despair, author Rebecca Solnit published Hope in the Dark. It is a stemwinder of an argument—not for optimism in the face of darkness, but for hope.

Solnit’s argument is neither new, nor necessarily liberal. On the last day of my American Government 101 class at SMU, I shared with my students a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Avoid the extremes of deadening pessimism and superficial optimism.” Instead, King demanded hope—active, committed, chosen hope, rather than the passiveness that flows from both pessimism and optimism.

King, in turn, echoed the Pragmatists, who argued against pessimism and optimism and in favor of meliorism—a longer word for hope. Meliorism holds that a better world is possible, and maybe even probable. But that better future can only emerge through action. To borrow and bend another quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., the moral arc of the universe will only bend toward justice if we roll up our sleeves and bend it.

For the Pragmatists, meliorism (let’s call it hope) is a foundational tenet of liberal democracy. Anti-slavery American founder Gouverneur Morris’s “more perfect union” is not guaranteed. Nor is it unattainable. It is possible. Put another way: whether there are good times in store is entirely up to us.

Neither George Strait nor Kyle Field, but a creepy, AI-generated photo from “A pro-America country music concert on a rotating platform in a large, open-air stadium in Texas.”