There are two questions I’m tired of hearing, and I’m certain you’ll recognize them. They are posed by overworked podcasters feigning sagacity, by lazy moderators kick-starting a discussion — or trying to rescue one — and by highbrow writers eager to unleash context on helpless readers.
The first: How did we get here?
This one often appears near the beginning of an exchange or an argument, and it heralds a big-picture, chin-stroking, dot-connecting answer. (It’s the successor to the even more overtly pedantic formulation: But first, some background.) The question is easy to answer because you can pick almost any moment as the precursor for any other; the links you choose depend on the story you want to tell. Proximate causes proliferate! If you don’t like the first ones you find, keep going — you’ll eventually spot one that suits your needs.
How did we get to the so-called Trump era, for example? If your answer is about economic inequality and the forgotten man, then maybe start with the World Trade Organization or NAFTA, or the decline of organized labor. If your answer is about race, then point to the backlash against the Obama presidency, or against identity politics or the civil rights movement, or maybe even against Reconstruction. If your answer is about our deteriorating political discourse, then call out Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh; if it’s about the nativist takeover of the Republican Party, then quote at length from Patrick Buchanan’s speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention. And so, ad infinitum.
Tip: The farther back you go, the more erudite you’ll sound. Well, really, this all traces back to 1066 ….
I am not attacking historical inquiry, which remains as vital as ever, but rather the seductive reductionism of mono-causal explanation, of pointing to that one thing back then that brought us all the stuff happening now. This is a common habit in the publishing world, too, with journalists and pop historians constantly pumping out books about how one singular year — usually 10 or 25 or 50 years before the book’s publication — is the year that changed the country, changed the world, changed everything.
Listen closely when people riff on how we got here, and you’ll see that their explanations invariably depend on how they feel about “here.” Whatever one deems most important about today will dictate the preceding events worth highlighting. That’s the dirty secret about “how did we get here” — it is not about dispassionately assessing the past, but about subjectively interpreting the present.
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The second question I wish we’d stop asking will not surprise you: What has surprised you the most about [fill in the blank]?
This is the utility infielder of questions; it can address any topic with equal ease. What has surprised you the most about Pete Hegseth’s tenure as defense secretary? What has surprised you the most about the college football playoffs? What has surprised you the most about the second season of that show? Or that new album? Or that special election?
The trouble with this question is that it removes the focus from the substance of whatever event or debate is being discussed, redirecting it to the speaker’s or writer’s personal perceptions or expectations about it — away from facts and toward idiosyncrasy. It’s barely better than the “What was going through your mind?” or “How does it feel?” questions in sports interviews after an athlete makes the shot, catches the touchdown, wins the championship. (The answer to “how does it feel,” by the way, is almost always that it feels “surreal.”)
So, the next time some host or moderator asks how we got here, I hope the answer is another question: Where is here? What exactly have we become, in this here, in this now? Once we settle that question, we can start to determine how we arrived at that condition.
And if you insist on asking what surprised someone most, then at least follow up with a more useful query: Why were you surprised? What misunderstanding lies at the heart of your surprise, and what is its source? Without those next steps, the first question is rendered useless.
No matter; I am sure these questions will continue to be posed. They are too easy, too obvious, too pervasive to do away with entirely.
Which leads me to one more: What does the persistence of such questions mean for us as a nation?
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