Mutually assured resentment: why Trumpism is global.

• Author: Oppenheimer, Daniel
• Position: Age of Anger: A History of the Present - Book review

Age of Anger: A History of the Present

by Pankaj Mishra

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pp.

You may not have seen the commercials for the new Google phone, the Pixel, but even if you haven't seen them, you've seen them. Lots of silver and white and bright colors. Beautiful people of every age, race, and ethnicity in soft, brilliantly dyed natural fibers, to a soundtrack of power pop. A gleaming, seductive vision of a frictionless world in which vibrant landscapes morph into one another, people are running through many-colored effusions of Holi powder, and technology is the handmaiden of connection and fulfillment. The Pixel ads could be ads for Lexus, Bose, Hulu, or any of the twelve other smartphones that do exactly the same things the Pixel does.

The commercials make me uneasy, as these sorts of ads almost always do--as, in fact, they're designed to do. They are distillations, in the form of thirty-or sixty-second desire bombs, of the fantasy that with the right stuff we can all have material security, creative fulfillment, control over our destinies, a tribe of cool friends, and a sense of belonging and place in the world.

Such a life looks amazing, and I don't have it, which is why I'm made uneasy by seductive depictions of it. The anxiety is mostly mitigated, though, by my awareness that no one else has that life either. And I'm basically one of the people in the commercials. On Facebook my life can look like that. I'm in that income bracket. I live in one of those creative-class cities. I do interesting things like write book reviews for the Washington Monthly. And yet my life, which on good days feels like a healthy struggle, is nothing like the commercial. Because the commercial isn't showing life at all but a fantasy of it designed to sell things.

So just think about all those people around the world who haven't lucked into most of the genuine fruits of modernity, as I have. Who don't know in their bones that the Google Pixel life is a lie, but instead fear that it's real but just not for them. Or who know that it's a lie but whose own lives are too impoverished, stifled, dreary, isolated, or impotent for them to experience the perpetual broadcast of that lie as anything other than an insult.

For these souls, lost and spinning in the space between what capitalism, industrialization, and liberalism have promised and what these forces of modernity have in fact delivered, what does the Pixel commercial provoke? Not just yearning and...