It’s not your imagination–everything has become a crisis. In 2026 alone, math education, ‘AI memorization‘ and even condominiums are now a crisis. The word crisis used to be reserved for major events such as the September 11 attacks or the 2008 Great Recession, but has now been expanded to include pretty much everything.
Around 2020, the media began to realize that the fastest way to get people’s attention was to frame every issue as a crisis or an emergency. The media, being a business, are not immune to incentives. They saw that overuse of alarmist language or absolutes (e.g. “Everyone is terrified AI!”) drove up clicks and engagement at a time when the media needed it most. Recall in 2018 Facebook changed its newsfeed algorithm, punishing media companies. So the media needed some way to replace the lost traffic. The pivot was a success and has become commonplace. So much so, there is even a meme about it–the so-called “current thing” for the issue that demanded the immediate and collective attention of the public.
It’s a weird–or at least unexpected–development in the sense that before the 2010s, “alternative media” was clearly distinct from “mainstream media.” The mainstream positioned itself as the calm, sober voice in contrast to outlets like Drudge Report, Info Wars, or Zero Hedge. Now the lines have blurred. There’s really no mainstream vs. alternative media anymore–it’s all just “media.” For example, the headline “Welcome to a Multidimensional Economic Disaster” would be perfectly at home on a site like Zero Hedge in 2012, but was published in The Atlantic on March 26, 2026.
I posit that the “crisification of the world” is also downstream or symptomatic of the perceived failure of democracy. With congressional approval ratings at historic lows, the public’s trust in its leadership has eroded. Trump and Biden both averaged around 40% approval–well below the roughly 50% that Obama and Clinton maintained. Democracy is increasingly seen as hopelessly inefficient or sclerotic in the face of mounting problems and uncertainty, whether it’s AI, declining social trust, or economic insecurity. To many, it’s no longer a system guided by wisdom or competence, but one that gives disproportionate influence to the loudest, most partisan, or least informed voices.
Democratic institutions are seen as too slow to respond, and political leaders as too complacent, captured, or incompetent to act with urgency. So the media has increasingly taken it upon itself to sound the alarm–hence everything becoming a crisis. There was an implicit promise at the heart of democracy: that the public would make well-informed choices, and that elected leaders would act with moral conscience in the best interests of the people they represent. That promise has clearly been broken.
Yes, this is hopelessly idealistic. Democracy has always been messy. There is no assurance that the “right people” will be put in charge. At the very least it should be self-correcting, but we’ve had nearly 300 years to get it right. And if anything, things have backtracked. There are many philosophers who warned of this, whose low opinions of humanity were expressed in writings. Given that governments are composed of people, time cannot possibly fix that what is intrinsic to the human condition itself.
In short, there is a growing realization that “liberal democracy” is failing, if it hasn’t already failed. And I want to emphasize that this is not exclusively a right-wing or Republican development. As discussed in my post, “Shared Dissatisfaction in an Age of Liberal Disillusion,” it’s increasingly a center-left and even bipartisan one as well. Many liberals–especially the well-educated–have come to recognize that “the Left” shares as much responsibility as “the Right” for the growing discontent, institutional distrust, and social fragmentation now visible across society.
Those who are old enough can remember in 2011 or so how there was OWS and the Tea Party. These groups on polar opposite ideological spectrums shared a dissatisfaction with the status quo or “state of things,” whether it was deficits, the perception of bailouts for Wall Street, or student loan debt. And then you had the “Obama middle” of liberals/Democrats who were more or less optimistic about progressive politics and democracy. And it stayed that way for years–until I reckon around 2021-2022–when it suddenly fell apart.
Now the center-left and liberals have joined in the choruses of anger. The media, being followers, has come along, with the tone of articles being framed in increasingly negative language, such as decrying the technological optimism that once defined the Democratic platform for much of the ’90s and 2000s, whether it was about personal computers in the ’80s, to the “information superhighway” in the ’90s, to cloning and embryonic stem cell research in the early 2000s (remember, it used to be Republicans who opposed stem cell research).
Fast-forward to 2023-2026 and the biggest critics of AI are from the left, such as The New York Times and The Atlantic, with the latter headlines such as “Here’s How the AI Crash Happens,” and by NYTs “How A.I. and Social Media Contribute to ‘Brain Rot’.” Smartphones and social media have become the “new cigarettes,” blamed for everything wrong with society, from mental health problems and falling grades to even being a form of warfare in and of itself. AI has become a crutch and has devalued learning (I guess no one has heard of CliffsNotes).
I call this the rise of the so-called “concern left”. These are people who check all the boxes on the usual liberal issues (e.g. LGTBQ+ rights, drug legalization, climate change concern, workers’ rights etc.), but have grown weary or concerned about the “liberal project” and have become much more pessimistic about the outlook for democracy. They see the push for wealth taxes in California or other confiscatory measures as overreach, much like the Covid restrictions, while initially perhaps well-intentioned, became overly politicized and tyrannical.
Liberals who have careers and family, having grown up, have come to regret or see the consequences of the period from 2015-2021, especially during Covid, in which narration came at the cost of credibility, leading to a backlash in 2022 and deserved distrust in democratic and cultural institutions (although this distrust long predates the 2020s). Even the most avowed of the progressive-minded have their limits. This was tested during Covid, such as the absurdities of having kids masked, schools closed, or lockdowns on perfectly-healthy young adults.
Or how George Floyd’s death, which one could argue sparked a needed conversation about police misconduct, led to condoning lawlessness under the banner of “defund the police,” which proved widely unpopular. Professors have to censor or modify their lessons to prevent accusations of insensitivity. Inclusion in sports has led to gender dimorphic mismatches. Again and again, what began as principled policy morphed into parody.
The “war on math enrichment,” “softness on crime” (especially in regard to shoplifting, leading to store items being locked up and lowering social trust) and perceived racial and political biases in hiring and college admissions, have been wholly unpopular across wide swaths of the country. Egalitarianism at the cost of excellence or individual success makes everyone worse off. Diversity or inclusion when shoehorned-in or at the cost of lowering standards, only makes people resent it, not celebrate it.
Overall, the media’s increasingly alarmist tone, such as everything being framed as a crisis, holds up a mirror to the public’s dissatisfaction and distrust of liberal democracy and social institutions, which have become perceived as increasingly deaf or impervious to change. But I think it’s time though to dial it back. Not everything is an existential threat just because it’s bad or unknown. Will AI lead to job loss? Maybe, but it’s premature to call it a crisis when the verdict is still out. Save labeling a crisis for things actually deserving of it.