America's Future: Are You Optimistic, Pessimistic, or Something Else?
Pondering the Nation's Path—and Its Soul
The day we call Independence Day actually isn’t our true Independence Day.
Scholars of American history have long known that nothing much happened on Thursday, July 4th, 1776. The date is inscribed on our Declaration, but the Colonies actually voted for independence two days earlier, on a Tuesday, July 2nd.
It happens. History, like memory, has a way of smoothing its edges. Significant moments are often buried under the weight of symbols and the dates we’ve been taught to remember.
Regardless, it’s a healthy exercise to read the Declaration, our nation’s birth certificate, and ponder the ideals and principles on which we were founded. Less common, though, is honest reflection about what those ideals mean now.
More common is the pedestrian question often raised at this time of year about America’s future. Wordsmiths and pundits seek out some sort of national pulse with a familiar question: What is the state of the Great American Experiment?
It’s asked with a tone of gravity and tradition, yet typically delivered with all the depth of a sound bite.
But it’s a question worth pondering, especially today, when the answer feels more elusive and uncertain than ever.
For many older Americans—and even those not yet old enough to be nostalgic—we grew up thinking of America as a land of confident optimism, positive thinking, and faith in progress toward a more perfect union. After the Second World War, that vision felt all but guaranteed. We thought of ourselves as leaders, not just of military might or economic power, but of what was moral, good, and right.
Now we look around and wonder if that’s still true. In recent decades, the national mood has shifted. We consume an endless stream of pop culture, polarized news, a media driven by melodrama, and carefully curated data, curated mostly by us, seeking what will reinforce our beliefs rather than reality. The reflexive narrative says America is in decline. That we’ve peaked. That our better angels have flown the coop and that there is no hope of ever being great again.
That’s a hard pill to swallow for older generations, and for generations not quite as old.
But when has that not been the case? For many of us, history begins at the moment we begin following it, and we tend to ignore much of what came before that. Declinists and moralists have been predicting the end of America for decades. As a precursor to his book, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” British historian Paul Kennedy wrote about the “Decline of America” in a cover storyfor the Atlantic Magazine... in 1987.
In 1960, John F. Kennedy warned that America was losing ground to the Soviet Union, that oppressive authoritarianism would overtake freedom and democray. If you look at the decade prior, the 1950s, its Cold War, creeping fears of nuclear annihilation, and the jolt of a Sputnik launch, you might understand why Kennedy would say that.
And long before that, many believed the country would never survive the human, political, and financial costs of a wrenching Civil War.
Moralists have prattled on with equal measure: temperance unions, opponents of suffrage, those repulsed by Prohibition-driven recklessness in the 1920s, that crazy rock n’ roll, hippies of the 1960s, gay marriage, and—what is it today? Transgender issues?
Each fear was a threat, a sign, supposedly, of America’s fall from grace. The fall of the Roman Empire, they warned!
Each fear was eventually revealed to be either overblown or flat-out wrong, as silly as those television censors who demanded Elvis Presley be shot only from the waist up, worried that his gyrating hips might give us the wrong idea. Yet, like the Bad Idea That Won’t Die, you never have to look far to find naysayers and doom-and-gloomers.
It’s not decline; it’s change. And change, by its nature, by its very nature, is uncomfortable. It is the friction between who we were, who we thought we were, and who we’re becoming, or think we are becoming.
We’ve experienced numerous seismic shifts over the decades, and with it, a belligerence among some who, through their political or moralistic prisms, have resented it. Perhaps their memory of American global hegemony or their definition of morality prevents them from accepting that the world has many viewpoints, and changes constantly, with you or without you.
What some see as deterioration is often adaptation—difficult, uneven, messy, and, despite any resistance or resentment, inevitable. America, it seems to me, has adapted pretty well so far.
Still, I do miss the aspirational nation we once were.
We sure used to be. We stood up for what was right! We fought for moral reasons, we passed and struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, and we acted like men. We aspired to intelligence; we didn’t belittle it; it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn’t scare so easy. And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one—America is not the greatest country in the world anymore. —Will McAvoy, The Newsroom, via Aaron Sorkin.
When I was a little boy, the future was everywhere. In the 1960s, you couldn’t turn a corner without seeing news stories touching on the idea of “tomorrow.” When you visited the New York World’s Fair of 1964 and ‘65, dozens of exhibits featured “The City of Tomorrow,” “The Home of Tomorrow,” and “The Transportation of Tomorrow.” These weren’t just exhibitions. They were invitations … to imagine, to hope, to believe in something beyond the immediate. To believe in the achievable. To believe in something great.
Somewhere along the way, that spirit faded. We could mine the years since for people or moments in time on which to lay blame for that outcome, finding many who would either agree or disagree. Likewise, we could mine the years for people who said it was there, and always there, finding many who would either agree or disagree. Probably not useful in either case, let alone objective.
But it does feel as if our spirit of dreaming is no longer the same.
We now seem to be a society whose decisions don’t factor in the consequences for “tomorrow.” We play for the quarterly report, the next election cycle, what’s in it for me instead of us. It’s as if the vision of tomorrow is gone, banished to the haze of nostalgia. We act as though “tomorrow” is someone else’s problem.
And I remind you that if you agree with that and say yes, it might be because of your political bias. Because the same people who would agree today and say yes, are the same people who would have disagreed and said no when a different political party was in power. And the same is true for those who said yes then, and no now. It’s hard to separate genuine worry from partisan reflex.
I don’t like the idea that political identity has become our primary form of self-definition and self-determination. As if being American means nothing unless we are either a Democrat or a Republican, a conservative or a liberal. Because now, it feels as if, to be one, you have to hate the other.
I call myself a Republican ‘cause I am one. I believe in market solutions, and I believe in common sense realities and the necessity to defend ourselves against a dangerous world and that’s about it. Problem is now I have to be homophobic. I have to count the number of times people go to church. I have to deny facts and think scientific research is a long con. I have to think poor people are getting a sweet ride. And I have to have such a stunning inferiority complex that I fear education and intellect in the 21st century. But most of all, the biggest new requirement, really the only requirement, is that I have to hate Democrats. –Will McAvoy, The Newsroom, via Aaron Sorkin.
Binary thinking has always existed. Yes or no. Black or white. North or South. Left or right. Red or Blue. Either-or. With us or against us, whoever “us” is.
But today’s divide feels more personal, more absolute, more existential. It’s not just that we disagree. It’s that we no longer believe in the good faith of those who do. It’s as if it’s no longer possible to disagree without being disagreeable. Look around. From elected officials to the people who elected them, their attitude, their behavior says: if you’re not like me, you’re not likable.
So the question returns: Can the spirit of an aspiring nation be revived? Or has it been drowned out by the partisan noise, the 24-hour spin cycles, the weaponized nostalgia and culture wars? Do we filter that question through our political prejudices, coming up with an answer that only satisfies one half of the country?
Or is there some sort of broad, tangible vision beyond the hackneyed rhetoric trucked out by partisans, politicians, and political speechwriters just in time for those predictable White House press conferences, or “State of the Union” messages?
Maybe the answer doesn’t lie in speeches or symbolic dates or even national visions. Maybe it’s something simpler. More local. More human.
The Constitutional Convention of 1787, which was intended to reform our government, was fraught with resistance by those who believed the Articles of Confederation needed little, if any, amending.
At one point during that sweltering Philadelphia summer, on a particularly difficult day of negotiation, Benjamin Franklin noticed a carving of half a sun on the back of George Washington’s chair and wondered whether it was a rising sun or a setting sun.
“How do you tell the difference,” he asked his fellow delegates, “since each is represented in the same basic way?
In the end, the Convention fulfilled its task of recommending improvements to the American form of government, with only three delegates refusing to sign the final document, impelling Franklin to remark on Washington’s chair, “I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”
So what is it now?
In our time of acknowledging American independence, has the American way given way to something else? Can what you see as today’s wrongs not eventually be righted? Or, go back a few years and ask what you saw as yesterday’s wrongs, not eventually be righted? Or are we doomed to suffer from one swing of the pendulum to the next, never finding a way to meet in the middle?
Do you still agree with Franklin that the American sun is in ascent, or have we begun, or are we in, the slow process of a setting sun?
I used to think I knew the answer to that question. I don’t know anymore.
But I do know this: Each of us is a citizen of this nation, this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day, and things that we often forget to do, or have forgotten how.
Civility, respect, kindness, character. We are too good for schadenfreude, too good for gossip and snark, too good for intolerance, and given the times we live in at this very moment, it’s worth mentioning that we are too good to think people who disagree with you are your enemy.
Unless you’re from California, in which case, they can go to hell. Oh, I kid California. I’m a proud native New Yorker. I have to say that, even though I live in California and am happily married to a Californian.
But as Margaret Mead said, never forget that a small group of thoughtful people can change the world. It’s the only thing that ever has.
I'm certainly subbing and recommending you. You write about what I write about, but with more intelligence and better writing.