Americans are coming to terms with a future being taken from them | Opinion

Maine psychologist argues Americans are quietly suffering under what he calls a "grand theft" of national life

A Portland-based psychologist and psychoanalyst says he has noticed something troubling in the faces of people around him, and he wants to talk about it.

Steven Stern, who maintains a private practice on Commercial Street, wrote in a recent column that he has spent a recent weekend traveling, watching travelers in airports, hotel guests, restaurant patrons, and pedestrians in a major city, before returning home to observe visitors to Maine. Across all of those settings, he said, the people he saw shared a common look.

"Most people — people of all ages, including children — look grim and unhealthy, as if there were no longer a promising future to look forward to, only the uncertain, very worrying present," Stern wrote.

Drawing on what he describes as a lifetime of reading people's body language and emotional states, Stern said his professional sense is that "a subtle depression emanates from most or all of them." He acknowledged that he cannot be certain whether what he is perceiving is real or whether it reflects his own current frame of mind.

Stern's larger argument is that this widespread unease reflects something concrete: a coordinated effort, as he sees it, to dismantle the country's foundational institutions and promises. He placed responsibility on the administration of President Donald Trump, along with members of Congress and the Supreme Court who, in his view, have aligned with that agenda.

"I realized that this is really the Trump administration's intention: to steal our future and dishearten us to the point that we give up in passive resignation, feeling helpless to do what would be necessary to reclaim and help shape our future," he wrote.

Stern itemized what he described as the targets of that effort. They include, in his telling, voting rights and the integrity of elections; freedom of speech and of the press; tax revenues and public spending; educational and cultural institutions and the freedoms that protect them; an ethically grounded justice system; affordable health care and access to scientifically grounded medical information; bodily autonomy and the right to live openly in one's sexual identity; environmental protections and the broader fight to preserve the planet; and the material standards of living that once underpinned the American Dream.

He also pointed to a less tangible loss, writing that "they have also stolen the sense of belonging from at least half the citizenry." While he noted that immigrants have faced the most direct harm, he wrote that even Americans who were born in the country are being made to feel unwelcome when the president denounces Democrats as enemies of the state.

"Much as I would want that not to affect me, it does," Stern wrote.

He went further, arguing that the administration is working to rewrite the country's understanding of its own past by restricting acknowledgment of slavery, racism and genocide. And he warned of what he described as an attempt to "steal the Constitution itself, by chipping away at it and the vision of America that it embodies."

Stern did not limit his concern to one political camp. He wrote that he believes the unease he is observing affects "all Americans — even the large group that is still identified with MAGA." He suggested that even voters who remain supportive of the president must, at some level, sense the magnitude of what is underway, particularly when it comes to entitlement programs.

"At the very least, many must be worried about the threats to their own well-being, should the administration seek to dismantle or seriously compromise Medicare and Social Security," Stern wrote. He pointed to the president's reported intervention in work on the Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., as an example of what he characterized as the administration's approach to public assets.

The column was published in the Portland Press Herald's opinion section, where Stern has previously written about the intersection of psychology and public life.

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