America’s new malaise

NBC news released a poll last year measuring voter sentiment in the United States. One particular answer revealed a deep-seeded cynicism among American citizens. According to NBC, 58 percent believe “America’s best days are behind it.” This registered as the highest level of dissatisfaction in over 30 years. Another poll, taken more recently, measured Republican voters, 70 percent of whom disagreed with the statement that America’s best days are ahead. This wasn’t surprising, given that Democrats control the White House and Senate and that tends to put the opposite party in a bad mood.

Still, there is a deep cynicism about America and it is more widespread than what can be explained by politics. This temptation is understandable. There are reasons to doubt whether our fragile experiment in government, limping along toward her 250th birthday, can be sustained. Our institutions at all levels have disappointed, the public is deeply polarized, and even those civic bodies that hold our communities together—churches, schools, volunteer organizations—are fraying under the weight of the widening chasms in American life.

In the last few years, we’ve endured the uneven handling of a global pandemic, a violent assault on the capitol, and a catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan. What’s more, there is little incentive to create a binding national unity. Both parties now compete to paint a bleaker picture of American life under their political enemy. The left is almost universally invested in telling our history in such a way as to see nothing redeemable about the American project. And conservatives often struggle and debate what we are even trying to conserve. Many have lost faith in the American project.

Thankfully, we can draw on history to help guides us through this crisis of confidence. We have been here before.

In the 1940s, A country brought to her knees by the Great Depression and a violent attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese summoned the courage to rally together and defeat the fascist menace across the ocean. In the 1970s, America was a nation mired in inflation, with hostages being tortured by an Iranian terrorist regime, having just barely moved past the failures in Vietnam and the scandal of Watergate. Many, including a president, wondered if perhaps her best days were behind her. Yet, the next decade would witness the defeat of communism, economic growth, and a resurgence of confidence.

Of course, we cannot smile our way past our problems. We should not look away from the pockets of dysfunction and hopelessness that pervade too many of our communities. We cannot paper over the corruption we too often see exhibited by people in power. And yet we should not be driven by the perverse incentives that exist today toward negativity and national self-loathing, a doctrine of despair that refuses to see what is good about America. Too often we also forget that according to the founders’ vision for our country, good government begins with self-government.

Christians have a theology that allows us to both face reality as it is, yet also embody hope. Our ultimate confidence is not in America’s uncertain future, but in a city whose builder and maker is God. Still, loving the country into which we have been born and rooting for her success isn’t a departure from faithfulness. A healthy patriotism is merely living out the command to “seek the welfare of the city” (Jeremiah 29:7). If there is a way to err with an over-realized patriotism, there is also a way to err by failing to love America at all.

A return to optimism about our future will require civic leaders who both channel our frustrations and get American believing in herself again. FDR, in that fateful address after Pearl Harbor, told the world that “the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” Ronald Reagan countered Jimmy Carter’s malaise with the message that it was “morning in America” again. That kind of inspirational leadership, of course, takes uncommon political skill, but it also takes uncommon political courage. It requires the willingness to both hear the voices of discontent but urge Americans to remember the goodness and uniqueness and promise of this great country.

Are the majority of Americans who feel our best days are behind us correct? I don’t think they are. But let’s not, through a failure of leadership, let this pessimism become a self-fulfilling prophecy.