The New Great Disappointment

By Prof. David Eller | 4 September 2025
Shuddhashar

(Credit: Shuddhashar)

Disappointment — especially in the failed promises of capitalism and democracy — is a driving force in contemporary American and global politics.

Historians and Americans who know their own history (which is not many) remember “the Great Disappointment” as the failure of William Miller’s Christian prophecy that expected the world to end in 1844. Obviously, the expectation was wrong, and apparently, his followers were disappointed by that fact. Some Millerites, who had sold or abandoned their belongings, did the rational thing and drifted away from the movement; others, though, in a textbook case of cognitive dissonance, doubled down on their belief, setting new dates for apocalypse or reinterpreting the original prophecy to claim that it actually came true, only in heaven and not on earth. From these claims eventually grew the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Political scientists and economists tend to view humans as rational actors; classical economic theory assumes that we will behave dependably to maximize our practical or financial interests. However, behavioral economist Dan Ariely (2008) argues that we are predictably irrational in a book by that very title, driven by logical fallacies, social norms, and other non-rational forces. Mainstream social theorists consistently ignore or undervalue non-rational factors in human behavior, including and especially emotion, identity, and prior belief. Clearly, belief was central to the Millerites, along with hope, and disappointment was a key emotional consequence.

Disappointment, I think, lies at the root of much of contemporary American politics and culture. But this time, the disappointment is in two other articles of American faith — capitalism and democracy. Americans have always been told that capitalism will make each generation wealthier than the one before, that it is the road to realizing the American Dream, and that hard work generally leads to success. This faith has been shattered in chronic and acute ways: chronically, wages have been flat for decades, wealth inequality has grown, and hard work seems unrelated to the rewards of society; acutely, the Great Recession of 2008, followed by the COVID-19 epidemic and spiking inflation in 2024, cast doubt on capitalism as the panacea that it is presumed to be.

Beyond politics and economics, many countries perceived Western social values, including some of our most precious ones, such as human rights, as alien concepts meant to weaken local sovereignty and traditional culture. In lieu of human rights, which ensure equality of all individuals and not just citizens, many countries turn to collective/national rights, to which only “the people” — construed along civilizational, ethnic, or racial lines — are entitled. At the extreme, the fundamentals of capitalism and democracy are altered, in favor of one-party guided capitalism in China or “illiberal democracy” in Hungary, the kind of democracy that is not premised on equality, human rights, freedom of expression, checks and balances, and fair elections (some have dubbed it competitive authoritarianism).

If there is anything that Americans supposedly believe in more intensely than capitalism, it is democracy, and yet many Americans are beginning to despair of it. A 2025 Gallup poll indicates that a mere 28 percent of Americans are satisfied with their democracy (and only 17 percent of Republicans), compared to 61 percent as recently as 1991 (Jones 2025). Elected officials are often perceived as unresponsive, incompetent, or untrustworthy, if not literally corrupt and malicious; the party system seems to offer no real alternative, and special interests are so entrenched that the preferences of the people are ignored.

As a result, support for undemocratic politics has increased lately, with nearly 25 percent open to “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections” and almost 20 percent willing to consider military rule (Drutman, Diamond, and Goldman 2018: 3). Most alarmingly, a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll in 2024 indicated that 20 percent of Americans (12 percent of Democrats and 28 percent of Republicans) see political violence as the possible solution to the country’s problems (PBS 2024).

Furthermore, the reaction to the cognitive dissonance of disappointment in capitalism and democracy, as with Miller’s end-of-the-world prophecy, is a certain kind of intensification of both, lurching toward more of what is not working. For capitalism, this takes the form of anachronistic images of factory jobs returning to America (despite automation and artificial intelligence likely performing many of these reputed tasks), protectionist tariffs, unilateral trade deals, a general ethos of zero-sum “winning,” and an immanent plutocracy of billionaires. For democracy, it expresses itself as the kind of purified demos-power or “populism” that seeks unmediated representation by — if not embodiment in — a strongman who will disregard if not abolish altogether the traditional and institutional (including legal and constitutional) impediments to “the will of the people” and who is dedicated, in the process, to root out and destroy the “enemies of the people,” be they liberals, immigrants, Muslims, journalists, intellectuals and their universities, or experts of any sort.

These two disappointments and their counter-movements go a long way toward explaining the rise of Donald Trump, for whom the path toward populist authoritarianism has been cleared by decades of capitalist and democratic underperformance. In this sense, Trump and the MAGA movement — idealistically but nebulously evoking an imagined period when America was great — are not an exception but rather a fulfillment, an apotheosis, of American grievances against their own system.

What is still more fascinating and distressing is the commonality of this sentiment around the world. In countries from Russia and China to Hungary, India, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, and the UK, populist strongmen (and occasionally women, as in Italy’s Giorgia Meloni or, although not yet in power, France’s Marine Le Pen) are setting aside the rule of law in favor of one-party or one-person autocracy (usually mixed with plutocracy), claiming to understand and advance the interests and the identity of “the people,” defined in exclusionary terms (European Christians in Hungary, Hindus in India’s “Hindutva” or Hindu-ness ideology). Even in the UK, where a right-wing populist government has not so far seized power, the Brexit departure from the European Union was promoted mainly as a “Britain for the British” campaign, rejecting immigration and outside (i.e., Brussels/EU) authority.

Granted, in different places, the disappointment in capitalism and democracy is felt and explained differently and leavened with local concerns about foreigners and wealthy interlopers (like George Soros). Beyond the United States and Europe, the complaint against capitalism is often phrased in terms of frustration with Western-imposed “neoliberalism” (and before it “development” and “structural adjustment”) and “globalization” that undermined their national economies. (Americans are often quick to forget that neoliberalism and globalization were invented and urged by the U.S. and UK, especially conservative leaders Reagan and Thatcher, who expected those systems to enrich their own countries through massive trade bonuses — yet another source of disappointment, as low-wage countries like China and India became sellers to the West instead of buyers from the West.)

Post-socialist countries such as Russia and Hungary resent the shock therapy of capitalization and democratization, which impoverished many of their citizens, ruined their manufacturing sectors, and foisted supposedly universal economic and political practices on them that were actually distinctly Western or specifically American, which were blamed for the impoverishment and ruination. The structures of “liberal internationalism” themselves — the network of institutions against largely constructed by the West after World War II, such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Health Organization, the International Criminal Court, and various UN agencies like UNESCO if not the UN altogether — not to mention the European Union and NATO, were questioned by countries around the world, including the United States which created and long dominated most of them.

Beyond politics and economics, many countries perceived Western social values, including some of our most precious ones, such as human rights, as alien concepts meant to weaken local sovereignty and traditional culture. In lieu of human rights, which ensure equality of all individuals and not just citizens, many countries turn to collective/national rights, to which only “the people” — construed along civilizational, ethnic, or racial lines — are entitled. At the extreme, the fundamentals of capitalism and democracy are altered, in favor of one-party guided capitalism in China or “illiberal democracy” in Hungary, the kind of democracy that is not premised on equality, human rights, freedom of expression, checks and balances, and fair elections (some have dubbed it competitive authoritarianism). Back in the United States, disappointment is only one of a constellation of negative emotions and experiences that twist our political culture tighter and tighter. Another, closely related, is disillusionment, the discovery that everything we believed in and counted on is eluding us, including American exceptionalism and greatness (it is diagnostic that most of the world’s desperate, disillusioned politics is about recovering lost greatness — in Russia’s case, literally lost empire — and undergoing a rebirth or “palingenesis” that amounts to a return of/to a fantasy golden age).

A third is sheer exhaustion, learning that our past efforts have mostly come to naught and that the struggle has no visible end; surely, the fiction of an “end of history” with triumphant capitalist democracy is no longer credible. Worse, we see ourselves fighting the same old fights, with foes like Russia, while the threats to our country, way of life, and planet like climate change seem insuperable. Fourth, underlying and escalating all of these is anger — anger at our leaders, anger at corporations, anger at foreigners, anger at bearers of bad news, and anger at anyone who disagrees with or differs from us.

After all, psychologists long ago determined that frustration causes aggression, and frustration is another kind or symptom of disappointment. Add to these pestilent identity, which divides Americans (and inhabitants of other countries) into clashing and hostile camps or tribes; “identity politics,” formerly the province of minorities and the marginalized, has been usurped by the (white, straight, Christian) majority on the grounds that their identity is now ignored, ridiculed, or endangered (as in the odious conspiracy of “the Great Replacement”). In the U.S., as in Hungary and elsewhere, racism wears the cloak of civilizational identity, in which (racial, ethnic, or religious) others threaten our civilizational privilege and pride.

The first Great Disappointment affected only a few people and left minimal scars on American society. The present Great Disappointment is infinitely more widespread and cuts much deeper. It is also difficult to foresee how we could rise from it: what could people realistically believe in now that has not failed them before, other than some make-believe former glory and greatness pitched by a con/strong man that salves our wounded national ego? Can we create new ideas, institutions, and identities — and will we be allowed to by the powers interested in preserving the status quo as it burns — and will we have the faith and energy to commit to them when, as The Who sang, we are determined that we won’t get fooled again?

References:

Ariely, Dan. 2008. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. New York: HarperCollins.

Drutman, Lee, Larry Diamond, and Joe Goldman. 2018. “Follow the Leader: Exploring American Support for Democracy and Authoritarianism.” Washington, DC: Democracy Fund Voter Study Group.

Jones, Jeffrey M. 2025. “Record Low in U.S. Satisfied With Way Democracy Is Working.” news.gallup.com/poll/548120/record-low-satisfied-democracy-working.aspx, accessed August 17, 2025.

PBS. 2024. “1 in 5 Americans Think Violence May Solve U.S. Divisions, Poll Finds.” www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/1-in-5-americans-think-violence-may-solve-u-s-divisions-poll-finds, accessed August 17, 2025.

Reprinted with permission from the author.

Jack David Eller is a cultural anthropologist and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology with Woxsen University in Hyderabad, India. He is the author of numerous books and articles on anthropology, religion, ethnic and religious violence, and contemporary populism, including Trump and Political Theology: Unmaking Truth and Democracy and (as editor) The Anthropology of Donald Trump: Culture and the Exceptional Moment.

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