The moments that weighed on me accumulated over the years. Friends who had grown up with me in economically strapped circumstances, for example, would tell me how they thought America was a disastrous mess – while sailing their boats, or sending me pictures from their multiple vacations. Political arguments that were once friendly jousting took on an almost religious hue.

Moments of weird nostalgia became more common, with people remembering grim years of industrial decline with a golden glow that I knew to be false. One of my hometown friends, for example, once pointed to a factory across the street we both lived on as boys and railed to me how he remembered when it was busy and full. But I reminded him that such a memory was literally impossible, because the building was already a mostly empty hulk when we broke its windows as kids in the early 1970s.

What’s going on? Ironically, this growing illiberalism is not the product of bad times, but of a long trend of rising narcissism and a sense of entitlement that was enabled by peace, prosperity, and rapidly improving living standards. The United States and other democracies have real problems, but the rise of a sour and selfish abandonment of democracy is not happening because of social injustice or “economic anxiety.”