So I watch a lot of YouTube videos about politics, history, populism, and current affairs. I came across one today. Actually, the YouTube algorithm recommended it to me. It was titled “Cycles of American Culture and the Rise of Resentment.” It was delivered by David Brooks, a Canadian-American book author and political and cultural commentator. He was lecturing at Yale University on April 13th, 2026. I have seen some of his interviews and read some of his articles, so I pushed play. What I was met with was a salve to my broken heart. A Band-Aid that might get me through this war on my worldview. It was hopeful, after going through the muck of reality. It shows a path out of this. It offers us a game plan. A game plan for every democratic society is entrenched in this battle for democracy. Are you ready for this? If yes, read on.
Keep in mind, he is lecturing Americans, but it is easily applied to Canadians. I will highlight some of his examples with Canadian ones where I can.
On the evening of VJ Day in 1945, just hours after the surrender of Japan brought World War II to its bloody close, Bing Crosby took to the airwaves. One might have expected a roar of triumphalism, a chest-thumping declaration of American exceptionalism. Instead, Crosby spoke of a “deep down feeling of humility.” He was joined by the actor Burgess Meredith, who read a dispatch from the legendary war correspondent Ernie Pyle. “We won the war because our men are brave,” Pyle had written. “We did not win it because destiny created us better than any other people. I hope that in victory we are more grateful than proud.”
Now, contrast that quiet, almost sombre restraint with any given Hockey Night in Canada. A young Celebrini scores his 45th goal and 115th point—and immediately smashes into the boards with his teammates, celebrating his goal. The crowd is equally electric with excitement.
In the seventy years between Crosby’s humility and the modern goal scoring celebration, something fundamental in the American/Canadian character shifted—not just the rules of the game, but the rules of the soul. We are living through the exhaustion of a 70-year migration that took us from a culture of self-effacement and institutional trust to a culture of radical individual liberation, and finally, into a “doom loop” of resentment. Our current political chaos isn’t merely a byproduct of economic inequality or algorithmic social media; it is a crisis of “minds and culture.” To understand how we pivot back, we must first look at the DNA of how we see the world.
1. Cultural DNA is Stickier Than You Think
We often treat politics as a reaction to the morning’s headlines, but the underlying cultural geography of the United States and Canada is remarkably, almost eerily, stable. Culture is the main driver of history; it dictates not just how we vote, but how we literally perceive the world around us. I will talk about the cultural shift Canadians took after Trump was elected to his 2nd term later.
To understand how we arrived at this doom loop, we need to show the shifts as they happened. Let’s start with post-WWII. We had a culture of moral realism. Moral realism is the belief that there are moral facts, such as ‘murder is wrong’, whose truth is independent of what anyone else thinks about it, that we must follow. We trusted the institutions to make us less selfish. People had faith in authority. They trusted their community. It was almost impossible for someone to be a loner. We united for the greater good. Women, for the first time, went to work to support the war. So that was the 40′-50’s.
The 1950’s went from wartime austerity, anxiety, and collective sacrifice to unparalleled postwar prosperity. Consumerism and suburban conformity took hold. Children were raised differently. Dr. Benjamin Spock theorized that children need to be hugged, loved, fed when hungry, and showered with affection. They need to be seen as individuals. This upended the model of rigid, authoritarian child-rearing. At the same time, many others were worried about conformity, lack of opportunity for women, people of colour, and other marginalized groups.
Now, many cultural shifts were pushbacks to the previous era. The 1960’s saw a huge cultural shift. The advent of the ‘Hippie’ era took root. At the time, the food was horrible, creativity was stifled, there was too much organization, and too much conformity. It was widely considered the cultural breaking of chains. The age of liberation. Be yourself, don’t conform. It reversed the 50′.
The 70’s were considered the shift from restraint to liberation, but this liberation of the 60’s led to social chaos in the 70’s. Granted, some of the best music, art, and film emerged from this era of creativity. From this chaos came a loss of institutional trust. We had the Vietnam War, Watergate, the decimation of manufacturing and the hostage-taking in Iran were key factors. Divorce rates were up, violent crime was up, and drug use exploded.
From the 70’s chaos came the 80’s bourgeois era. Some people didn’t like what Woodstock did to the moral fabric, and they decided that they needed to reimpose bourgeois values like self-discipline, being on time, dressing appropriately, being entrepenurial and believing in institutions. There was an emphasis on character. The rule of respectability drove this era. A key holdover from the 70’s, individualism was not reversed.
“Culture is the main driver of politics and history, and of just the way we see the world.”
2. The “Bobo” Synthesis: How the 90s Tried to Have It All
By the 1990s, America attempted a grand cultural reconciliation to solve the friction of the 60s and 80s. We saw the rise of the “Bobo”—the Bohemian Bourgeois. This was an era where the creative, rebellious spirit of the 1960s merged with the disciplined, ambitious meritocracy of the 1980s.
This was creating the dominant social class that merged the tenets of the 50’s (rules and conformity) with the 60’s (creativity). In a nutshell, this created an elite group of highly educated, financially successful individuals who held onto creative rebellion. The Bobos wanted to be successful without being “shallow.” They solved the tension of making seven figures while remaining “authentic” through a specific, almost religious mode of consumption. This brought the advent of socially responsible consumerism. Think Tradere Joes, Whole Foods, Organic industry.
At the same time, the Berlin Wall fell, Communism fell, the EU was created, and there was peace in the Middle East. These were things that were dividing people.
By building a new, exclusive meritocracy based on educational pedigree, the Bobo class inadvertently created a new caste system. The reconciliation of opposites looked, to those outside the circle, like a self-serving elite trying to have its cake and eat it too.
3. The Architecture of Resentment: Why “Unseen” is the Most Dangerous Way to Feel
When the Bobo synthesis began to crack under the weight of 21st-century failures—9/11, the Iraq War, and the 2008 financial crisis—the nation transitioned from a loss of institutional trust to a devastating loss of interpersonal trust. There was a loss of faith in unregulated capital, a loss of faith in doing good abroad. Loss of the feeling of safety. The advent of social media had us hoping that if we could communicate with each other, we could solve all of worlds’ problems. Democracy stopped spreading, and in fact, we are in the 26th year of its retreat globally. We had a loss of social connection, moral knowledge and a secure base.
This vacuum is filled by what the philosopher Max Scheler called a “spiritual contraction”: Resentment. It is a response to humiliation—the feeling of being denied the dignity the culture promises you. This “social chasm” is backed by harrowing data: college graduates now live ten years longer than those with only a high school degree. They are five times less likely to have children out of wedlock and six times less likely to die of an opioid addiction. We were missing a shared moral order. Those who resented this social chasm were left on their own to devise their own moral philosophy. This led us to “if we don’t agree on what we ought to do, I can’t trust you”.
When you feel “unseen,” as if you are living in “fly-over country” within your own heart, you begin to devalue the things you cannot reach. We have told generations of young people to “find their own truth,” but unless your name is Aristotle, you cannot build a moral code from scratch. Left “morally naked” and alone, many have retreated into a sour-grapes response.
“Resentful people feel they devalue the things they feel they lack… they develop a classic sour grapes response.” This era led us to Populism. Populism is a political approach that champions “the people” against a perceived “elite’ or establishment. It is a belief system for people who feel betrayed. This is the very reason that Donald Trump was elected President of the United States…twice. This is the fundamental principle behind MAGA. The Manosphere, The Alberta Separatists, the Proud Boys, and the Maple MAGA.
4. The Nihilism Trap: When Cynicism Starts to Look Like Wisdom
The 2000’s – 2010’s is when resentment becomes the dominant paradigm, it belies a form of nihilism that believes only the “lower” things—power, force, and ego—are real. Nihilism is the philosophical belief that life is without meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value. As Brooks stated, this is the logic of the “Melian Dialogue” from Thucydides: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
This worldview pits “life as force” (the ideology of dominance) against “life as cooperation.” To the resentful person, ideals like honour, altruism, and integrity are merely “niceties” or shams used by the powerful to mask their greed. This is where the MAGA movement, the Alberta Separatists, and the rest of the disenfranchised groups bond. This cynicism is a self-poisoning mechanism. It leads them to embrace “bullies” because they believe a cruel world requires a cruel leader. The irony is that they would rather burn down their own homes just to ‘stick it to the man’.
“Altruism, generosity, honour… those things are mirages [to the resentful person].”
When we believe that selfishness is the only reality, we arouse the “fascist in each of us“—that part of the human soul that seeks power over others to soothe its own impotence. This resentment is about social standing. Someone makes another feel inferior to them, and the result of this is making them feel ‘unseen’ and insignificant. Max Scheler, a German born philospher from the late 19th century, posits that democratic capitalism is the perfect breeding ground for resentment. When you produce a society that advocates equality but produces inequality, you get resentment. The resentful person ferments and begins to devalue the things they feel they lack or can’t get access to. This inner pain leads to outer hostility.
There was/is a marked rise in pessimism and a sense of humiliation. These people who feel entitled to the ‘American Dream’ are devastated and humiliated when they are denied a home loan, access to a good education, equal human dignity, or being labelled as the ‘dummies’ of society. They watch the wealthy kids climb to remarkable success while their children struggle to simply graduate high school. The inequity is palpable. Politicians like Donald Trump and Pierre Pollievre capitalized on these feelings. He was/is easily able to sway their loyalty to his domain, where he hates the same people, all the while, enriching himself with power and wealth on their backs. The irony is not lost on me here, or them, to be honest.
5. The “Defiant Humanism” Path Forward
If our problem is a spiritual and cultural deficit, the antidote must be a pivot to humanistic values. Humanism is the insistence on the inherent dignity of every person and the reality of virtues that sit higher than self-interest.
Brooks talks about scrolling through social media a month after the October 7th attacks, drowning in brutal images, when he came across a clip of James Baldwin from the early 60s. James was a Black author and activist in the 1950’s. Despite the systemic cruelty with which America had treated him, Baldwin refused to be calloused over. He looked at the interviewer and said, “There’s not as much humanity in the world as one would like, but there’s more than you would think… there’s enough.”
That is “Defiant Humanism.” It is the choice to stand for the higher virtues even when the world feels suspicious and dark. It requires a process of “rupture and repair.” The theologians tell us that pain can either break us or “break us open.” Brooks read 3 books when he found himself at his rock bottom after a divorce and his kids going off on their own. He referenced Paul Tillich, who spoke of suffering carving through the floor of the soul’s basement to reveal a deeper cavity; Henry Nouwen, who urged him to stay in the pain to hear its lessons; and Frederick Buechner, who reminded him that being “broken open” makes us vulnerable enough to change. It is only after we are broken open that we can move to change. If we stay broken but put a band-aid over the wound, we remain the same, only hardened even more in place.
The Next Cultural Pivot
American history is defined by “churn”—the shifts of the 1770s(American Revolution), the 1890s(industrialization), and the 1960s(Individualism). A churn is a time period with a high turnover of people, ideas, or social norms that result in instability, loss of tradition, or a rapid, restless evolution of identity. It is destabilizing. While we currently feel trapped in a doom loop, a shift is inevitable because the current paradigm of resentment is clearly not working. It isn’t providing the “secure base” humans need to flourish.
The Canadian history of these “churns” is highlighted by the Indigenous Displacement between the 17th-19th centuries, the colonial conquest of the 19th-20th century, the Modern crises of the 20th century, and the Japanese internment camps. In addition, there was the October crisis of 1970 and the Quebec referendums in the 80’s and 90’s. I want to add a new “churn”. It is very recent but profoundly important at this present day. When Donald Trump threatened to annex Canada at the beginning of his second term, he lit a fire under Canadians that the world had never seen. At the time, our country was flailing. Conservatives looked to be headed toward a victory to replace Justin Trudaeus, Liberals. Resentment and pessimism were at an all-time high. We were struggling with the right-wing hold of the Conservative Party (which still holds today). Those of us who could see what was happening in the US rallied together to stop it from coming to Canada.
I thank the universe for that awful human for saying what he said. Mark Carney stepped out as the new Prime Minister when Trudeau decided to step down. It was a catalyst for what came next. When the official election was finally held, Canadians banded together behind Mark Carney. He proved himself a worthy captain for our ship. He stood up to Trump. He told him that Canada will never be for sale.
The Cons, on the otherhand were ready to sell us to the highest bidder just to enrich themselves. Much like Harper did when he sold off our energy companies to foreign investors.
And since then, we as a united country have beaten the bully. We stopped buying US-made products, we stopped going to the US for personal and business trips, we rescheduled conferences in other countries, and we stood our ground. We are standing our ground. We made the Americans notice. We put a real hurt on them. We have cut them off at the knees. While we hold up the wall, Carney has solidified our footing on a new foundation. A Canadian-built foundation. We will have our own version of Biden’s ‘building back better’. Canadian growth built with Canadian resources. Shoring up our national defence. Cancelling the .70 of every dollar that was going to the US for our defence spending.
Our reliance on them is over. The sign in the window has been replaced with “open for business”. And boy, have we gotten the business. Canada just outpaced every G7 country in growth.
So, in Canada, we are seeing this paradigm shift. This cultural shift replaces resentment with humanism. We see a tremendous hunger for uplift everywhere we look. We see it in the collective tears shed over the quiet goodness of Mr. Rogers, or the massive popularity of Ted Lasso—a show built entirely on the idea of helping people become “better versions of themselves.”
We just witnessed 4 amazingly good and talented scientists(one being Canadian) go further in our universe than any other human ever. We waited with bated breath for those updates. WE watched in cautious optimism as the rockets burned off before entry. Us Gen-Zer’s held our collective breath until they were safely floating in space. We held it just as long when they came back. Their story had a very happy ending. No megalmaniacs at the helm. No tech bros fighting for world domination, no politicians enriching themselves on the backs of their constituents. Just pure human awe-inspiring self-sacrifice for the greater good. These aren’t just pop-culture hits; they are signals of a soul-hunger for lives worth admiring.
Where do we go from here?
Are we currently in a doom loop of resentment, or are we simply waiting for the next person to show us a life worth admiring? History suggests that when the paradigm of cynicism finally exhausts itself, we don’t look for a better policy, Brooks says, we look for a “moral bath.” We look for someone to show us that there is, indeed, enough humanity in the world to begin again. Earnest admiration is the most effective antidote to resentment. Humanism is the perfect antidote to nihilism.
How do we do this? We do it by making excellence attractive to the young, holding up the educators, the scientists, the researchers, the do-gooders, as the new models of our time. In Canada, we have started. Prime Minister Mark Carney is leading the world out of nihilism and back into humanism. He has shared his playbook with every other country that shares our values. He is keeping the world from hitting the iceberg and bringing us all safely back to the shore. He could be the new model of our time and give us all our safe passage back to human decency. I think many others are ready to join him. Are you ready to return to the rules of basic decency? I know I sure am.
If anything I have confessed or created resonated, please let me know