America Is in Better Shape Than Everyone Seems to Think

It is rare for me to disagree with Ezra Klein quite so vigorously, but this is just wrong, wrong, wrong:

Democrats mocked [Donald Trump’s] “I alone can fix it” message for its braggadocio and feared its authoritarianism, but they did not take seriously the deep soil in which it was rooted: The American system of governance is leaving too many Americans to despair and misery, too many problems unsolved, too many people disillusioned. It is captured by corporations and paralyzed by archaic rules. It is failing, and too many Democrats treat its failures as regrettable inevitabilities rather than a true crisis.

Political parties that are out of power normally have a keen interest in making things sound terrible. After all, they have to promise to fix things in order to get the votes to get back in power, but nobody is interested in fixing things unless they’re convinced they need fixing. So Republicans shout about the deficit and moral decay because those are well-known ways of scaring people into voting against Democrats. Democrats insist that the middle class is dying and Medicare is under assault, because those are well-known ways of scaring people into voting against Republicans.

This is all normal—but it can become abnormal if both parties, along with pretty much every pundit, is insisting that the country is going to hell. To the average voter, it seems right now as if the deficit is skyrocketing, moral decay is rampant, the middle class is dying, and Medicare is under assault. And a hundred other things. Nothing is going well.

This is just flatly wrong. Obviously the COVID-19 pandemic has put everyone in a bad mood to begin with, but our national despair far predates that. So what’s going on?

I’m not going to bother putting up all the charts again, but the facts simply don’t bear out the doomsday thinking. Incomes are up. Crime is down. Kids are being educated. Racial resentment has been easing. Views on morality are about the same as always.¹ Health care costs are becoming more manageable. Interest payments on the national debt are low. The internet has provided everyone with huge new opportunities for entertainment and education and social togetherness. Electric cars are becoming more common and hands-free driving is no more than a few years away. And just last year, we created a vaccine for a brand new virus in less than a year. Less than a year!

Problems? Sure, of course. Climate change is the big one. Poverty is still with us, though it’s declined substantially over the past few decades. Racial justice still has a long way to go. Too many Americans continue to have no health coverage.

But are these problems worse than they were 30 years ago? Or 40? With the exception of climate change, no. They just aren’t. In practically every sense, the United States is better off today than it was in 1980. It’s also better off than just about any other country on earth. And we are not any less happy than we’ve ever been.

And yet nobody believes that we’re doing pretty well even though the evidence is all but irrefutable. Why? I believe the answer is not so much that we’re dissatisfied as that we’re scared. Practically everybody has a vested interest in scaring the hell out of us these days. Fox News is the obvious example on the right, an institution that’s done such a good job of scaring its viewers that two-thirds of Republicans believe that Joe Biden is a socialist, and a substantial portion are so panicked they were willing to invade the Capitol to prevent him from becoming president. The left has nothing to equal this, but after four years of Donald Trump many of us are nonetheless convinced that incomes are plummeting, the poor are being hammered, and racial justice is going nowhere. None of this is grounded in data.

I don’t know what to do about this. Gridlock in Washington obviously contributes to our feelings of gloom, but that’s not due to any fundamental failing of American society. It’s due to the fact that we’ve been politically split 50-50 for the past two decades and nothing has come along to change that. This makes both sides irritable, but ironically it’s a sign that there’s nothing hugely wrong with the country. If there were, one party or the other would be able to take advantage of it and gain power for a sustained period. Still, even if this is basically a sign of stability, it’s also true that decades of trench warfare with nothing much to show for it is pretty dispiriting.

Even though I don’t know how to fix all this, I can think of one thing that would help: we could all stop insisting that the country is about to spiral into doom. On a purely material level, it’s not happening and there’s no evidence it’s about to happen. And I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of another country that’s better set to face the future than ours.

In other words, America isn’t failing, and the widespread fear that it is, especially among Republicans, isn’t rooted in deep soil. Just the opposite. It’s based on little more than demagoguery. That doesn’t mean we have no problems to solve. It just means we’re doing a better job of solving them than most people think.

¹By a large margin, Americans rate our current moral values as poor. But Americans have always rated current moral values as poor. Nothing about this has changed in the past few decades.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate