I find this piece lacking in clarity and specifics about US history. A crucial and glaring omission is the long shadow of slavery and sharecropping over everything here. Wages and labor rights are permanently depressed, because it has not been that long in historical terms since workers could be property or the next best thing, indentured servants. Our politics is also a product of a “3/5 of a person” environment, in which the franchise is not truly considered a universal right. The way slavery built family fortunes serves as a model for more recent dynasties who feel no responsibility for the welfare and sustainability of the lives they exploit. Our agriculture is likewise an extension of slave-based ideas — farmers here are now little more than high-tech sharecroppers, deeply in debt to corporations and banks, with little or no recourse.
At the other end of the argument, I find the author’s assertion of “moral universals” utterly vague and without context. Is he talking about religion? national patriotic myths? Ethics based in philosophical reasoning? If it’s religion… we have more of that than anywhere outside the Middle East, and it’s not helping. If it’s ethics — I would argue that people in Europe are not more ethical inherently, they simply have far stronger boundaries around pesonal and corporate behavior, boundaries which are a response to past catastrophes as much as anything (ask an American what the treaty of Westphalia is, or ask for a summary of the events leading up to WW1, and see the blank stare). If it’s national myths… well there may be something to that. America is not really a nation, it’s just a state entity. Our alleged sense of national identity is primarily an idea of whiteness based in deep ignorance of our own origins and history. Yes, late arrivals, and even many black Americans, assert patriotic ideas — but it’s shallow, and not really founded in the ties of kinship and place which are the bedrock of national identity. So perhaps the US is failing because we never really succeeded at anything but growth and wealth-accumulation and the projection of force.
Finally: the author neglects the expensively and relentlessly promulgated fantasies of libertarianism which have drowned American politics since about 1975, built on a false narrative of a rugged individualist past. In fact libertarianism is designed precisely to combat a collectivism which emerges from the union movement and civil rights struggles, the latter movements being at least equally relevant to the history of the US from 1850 to 1970.
I won’t argue we are doing well. I share the sense that something is ending. But “moral universals” is a vague and weak notion. If there is hope for the US, it lies in the creation and re-assertion of legal boundaries around the behavior of powerful actors, and new shared experience of the benefits collective action and pooled resources.