Is America a Failed State? More Than We Realize
“Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.”
(attributed to) Winston Churchill
The title of George Packer’s recent article in The Atlantic, “We Are Living in a Failed State,” expresses the depressing conclusion he drew from America having flunked three major crises in the 21st century. Sadly, it’s hard to find fault with Packer’s premises or his analysis. But what’s even sadder is that Packer wrote his piece in the early period of America’s fumbling of COVID-19, before the murder of George Floyd and its aftermath. And well before the recent (and ongoing) nationwide spike in virus infections and deaths confirmed that we not only bungled the initial response to the pandemic, we learned nothing from that experience. Instead we tragically continue to compound our errors, in effect doubling down on stupidity and incompetence. The takeaway? We Americans seem utterly incapable of coming together as a nation against the starkest, most obvious of foes — be they viral contagion or racial injustice — and do the right thing. So instead we content ourselves to fight inane culture wars, the latest regarding an open letter in Harper’s denouncing intolerance of speech that ran into a buzz saw of … intolerant speech, with each side claiming the higher moral ground while standing on self-righteous quicksand. Let the Tweetstorms and Mediumrants ensue! Oh, America. How did we sink this low? And is there any shred of hope for us to save ourselves?
I Come Not to Praise Us, Nor to Bury Us
No close observer of our country, as I have been all my life, would declare us completely down and out. But as one who has a still-living World War II veteran father, a man who wasn’t at all remarkable in his generation for taking up arms to defeat the pernicious evil of Nazi fascism, I can’t help but survey our current social and political landscape with a dismay bordering on abject pessimism. I don’t think of myself as all that old (although my college-aged kids might disagree), but I’ve witnessed America rebound from major 20th century crises, like Watergate, the Arab Oil Embargo and the Vietnam War, to emerge into the post-Cold War 1990s actually hopeful about our nation’s prospects.
Looking back, however, I recognize the deeper warning signs. The red flags are now apparent that we Americans were, even then, sewing the seeds of our own (possible) destruction. I remember standing on Bruin Walk in the fall of 1980, for instance, both amused and perplexed as two factions of students vied for political attention. One group was protesting the hike in tuition recently proposed by the UC Regents. As a sophomore I knew I had, hands down, the world’s greatest deal in higher education: attending UCLA at $237 per quarter. A modest three percent (as I recall) fee increase, long overdue, seemed more than reasonable. And yet these students acted like they were being drafted to fight the Viet Cong, complete with repurposed ’60s-era chants. Meanwhile, across the way, a bunch of clean-cut Bruin Republicans were handing out pro-Reagan campaign materials and talking up the need to slash income taxes and government regulation. Huh? Los Angeles was only just beginning to address its horrendous smog, chiefly caused by unfettered vehicle emissions. And Californians had already drastically limited property taxes in 1978 with Proposition 13. But somehow these fledgling Tucker Carlsons and Laura Ingrahams thought that those steps were too much and not enough, respectively.
Since then, life on America’s college campuses has taken on a uniquely Balkanized quality, with the now-commonplace catchphrases of snowflake sensitivity, including “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings” and “microaggressions.” After the first day at my son’s college orientation last year, feeling a little overwhelmed by the plethora of personal pronouns being offered up, I hazarded that perhaps a person could choose to simplify them somehow. “No, Dad,” I was sternly rebuked. “That’s not the point.” Meanwhile, back in greater America, I’ve been captivated by both the velocity and ferocity of the debate about capitalizing the “b” in black and (or not) the “w” in white, as a modifier for Americans. My wife gently and lovingly reminds me that I don’t want to sound like “our parents’ generation” pushing back on more progressive locutions that replaced “colored” and “oriental” — which of course I certainly don’t. And given the struggles of African Americans as heirs to centuries of slavery and injustice, a lousy capital letter is the least America can offer as recompense. But will every subgroup, whether self-identified by skin color or otherwise, now need to fight for its upper case initial? Are we forever to remain, first and foremost, hyphenated Americans instead of generic Americans? Naively, I thought the meaning of e pluribus unum was: out of many, one.
Okay, steady on now, gentle reader. I can already hear the culture warriors among you gearing up for a fusillade against yet another retrograde white (or White?) male American who needs canceling. So let me save you the bother; I’m already (mostly) irrelevant. You see, I’m what you might call a centrist — center-left for the most part, but that’s splitting hairs — and we’re already so endangered as a species it’s hardly worth wasting your ammunition on us. But just in case you might be curious if we pragmatic moderates have any last words before our national trajectory deposits America squarely in the dustbin of history, please allow me to offer three possible correctives.
Regaining Our Bearings
Philosophically, our objective as Americans has always been a more perfect union. This comes, of course, from the Preamble to the Constitution, that exquisitely concise statement of purpose, which also lays out the guideposts to get there: justice, domestic tranquility, national defense, general welfare, and liberty. We’ve updated the roadmap as needed to aid in our navigation, through amendments, statutes and court opinions. But somehow of late we’ve completely lost our way. And extremists on the far left and far right are absolutely no help as we try to regain our bearings. The last thing we need as we hunt back and forth for direction like a confused bloodhound is strict adherence to some misguided notion of ideological purity. Especially as the two (main) political extremes are diametrically opposed in their orthodoxy.
Let’s be honest, we Americans have flirted with and even engaged in extremism throughout our history, from post-Civil War Jim Crow to McCarthyite red-baiting. But somehow we’ve always found our way back to a truer course. In recent decades, however, it seems we’ve firmly and unequivocally divided into opposing camps, blue states and red states, Democrats and Republicans, which infects every aspect of American life, including whether to wear a mask during a pandemic — as if the virus cares a whit about party affiliation. And within those individual camps, deviation from the extremes is viewed as apostasy. We know how the Tea Party movement and other hard right-wingers expunge anyone in the GOP who is viewed as moderate. And now word has it that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi will have a Democratic challenger in her San Francisco congressional race who calls her “not progressive enough.” Nancy Pelosi? Not progressive enough? That’s like calling Tom Hanks not wholesome enough.
The twin tensions in American political thought have always been between freedom and equality. But now, all the far right wants to talk about is freedom, as if we’re all characters in some anarcho-capitalist Ayn Rand novel. Freedom to own guns without regulation. Freedom to get rich without taxation. And freedom to exploit the environment without consequences. Meanwhile, all the far left wants to focus on is equality, as if Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels have been transported forward in time to 2020 to help us vanquish our economic and cultural oppressors and install some American socialist nirvana. Equality of wealth. Equality of income. And equality of social standing. But here’s a big, juicy newsflash to both groups: we have seen the enemy and it is us. In other words, by focusing on your one supposed utopian lodestar, to the exclusion of everything else, you’re running us all aground on the shoals of extremism.
Finding Our Balance
To regain our bearings requires internalizing a necessary sense of balance. A balance that says, contrary to Barry Goldwater’s doomed 1964 pronouncement, extremism in defense of liberty — or equality — is no virtue. Any reasonable American intuitively perceives that, as a nation, we are completely off-kilter. And it’s not just because a raving demagogue named Donald Trump occupies the White House. As many have already noted, Trump is the symptom, not the disease. And the disease, my fellow Americans, is a near-fatal lack of a balanced perspective, politically or otherwise. (I say near-fatal only because we’re still on life support, for what that’s worth.)
We’re out of balance in almost every way you’d care to mention, and that imbalance knows no party or ideological allegiance. CEOs make far too much compared to their corporate juniors. And we tax the rich far too little, while we spend precious tax revenues far too casually. Life’s trivialities are endlessly obsessed over and hugely important problems — like climate change and the national debt — are kicked down the road. We under-regulate our financial institutions and the environment and we over-regulate how we’re supposed to talk to each other. Federal funds are lavished on the military for endless, unwinnable wars, while our domestic infrastructure crumbles. We don’t save enough, individually or collectively, and we don’t sacrifice enough for each other. We’re too entitled, too fat and too complacent. Oh — and we’re far too quick to blame others for our personal misfortunes. And too quick to take credit for fortunes that arose from outside help. We demonize globalism yet our doorsteps are littered with a never-ending stream of cardboard boxes from Walmart and Amazon filled with foreign-made products. Loyalty is viewed in terms of ideology or sect rather than to objective facts and the greater good. Finally, feminism is defined not by equality of opportunity but the negating of gender. While patriotism is defined not by duty to community and country but by party affiliation.
How did we get so unbalanced, so out of true? That’s a complicated question with probably dozens of interrelated answers. But the inconvenient truth, to borrow a phrase from a former vice president, is that unless we can get ourselves back into balance — on multiple dimensions — we’ll never regain our bearings as Americans.
Summoning Our Bravery
Facing up to a problem, like our chronic lack of balance, takes courage. As Americans, we got used to ruling the roost and playing second banana to no other nation. We were a shining beacon of freedom and an exemplar to the world of democratic values. Those days, however, are done. Sure, militarily we’re still powerful, and our economy will always matter, but it’s our less visible systemic weaknesses that will do us in if we don’t re-calibrate. We might limp along through the rest of the 21st century resembling our former selves, like some transatlantic version of a post-Pax Britannica United Kingdom, but we won’t be fooling anyone, including China. Bravery involves harnessing some combination of humility, strength and resolve. We’ve never been particular adept as a nation at recognizing our weaknesses or admitting our faults, and it’s going to take tremendous fortitude to do so now. Maybe we haven’t actually been the land of the free — until Black Lives Matter fully takes hold, that is— but perhaps it’s not too late to be the home of the brave.
Examples of American bravery abound if we care to look for them, both past and present. The roll call of modest, hard-working, virtuous Americans is long, if perhaps not outwardly glamorous. For some reason we often find ourselves attracted to the shiny flimflam artist rather than the true hero, but if we’re to have any hope for recovery, we need to rectify that orientation. When I think of brave, moral Americans, I think of John Wooden, Jackie Robinson, Helen Keller, Rosa Parks, John Paul Stevens, Susan B. Anthony, Warren Buffett, Harriet Tubman, Pat Tillman and Neil Armstrong. In politicians, it’s the steady, self-sacrificing ones who come to mind, not the ego-driven ideologues. I’ve read too much about Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to put them in my pantheon of greatness. Rather, give me a Dwight Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush or Barack Obama. Not much bling, just solid and dependable.
The Balanced Bravery of Barack Obama
Barack Obama is actually a perfect example from recent history of self-made decency and bravery in an American politician, one who sacrificed for his country’s benefit knowing full well the risks. And he’s a telling example of how out of balance so many American citizens have become, in their skewed vision of what he represented. I well remember returning from Washington, D.C., in late 2011, having finally met President Obama after working on both of his presidential election campaigns. It was the greatest of honors and I was almost literally floating on air, but all I heard from liberal and conservative friends was how lacking he was as a leader. For me, this was ludicrous; didn’t they see the same thoughtful intelligence, grace and integrity that I saw? On the left, people actually carped that he wasn’t liberal enough, that he needed to better champion the environment or gay rights. My pointing out that he’d inherited an economy in free-fall and, after 2010, was saddled with a Republican-controlled Senate, fell completely on deaf ears. From the conservative-minded, it was all Fox News talking points: how he was a closet socialist or even deserved impeachment for issuing illegal executive orders. Impeachment? Really? The only thing missing, it seemed, was the scurrilous and racist birther claim. I felt like I was living in some alternate reality. But unfortunately it was reality, just an unhinged American version.
If Election Night on November 4, 2008, was one of America’s most proud and hopeful moments — and the version on November 8, 2016, was one of its most cynical and worrisome — it’s not because of the particular men who were elected to sit in the Oval Office. It’s what they say about us as a country. Are we the kind of people to cherish open, rational discourse and judge people, in the immortal words of Martin Luther King, Jr., not by the color of their skin but the content of their character? Or are we the kind who close our minds, demonize the “other” and allow ourselves to succumb to fear in the face of adversity?
I know it’s so tempting to blame those on the other side for our ills, but that sort of right/wrong binary fallacy is what got us here in the first place. Sure, I don’t understand where the desire comes from to control women’s bodies, stigmatize immigrants — despite our being a nation founded by them — and worship gun ownership at the expense of our schoolchildren. But I also can’t sympathize with the kind of whiny entitlement that vilifies entrepreneurs and views compromise on any political or social issue as a form of Munich-like appeasement, including spiting your country if your preferred democratic socialist candidate doesn’t win the nomination. In either case, if that’s the vision for our country’s destination, let me off. First, I don’t want to be a captive in either place. And second, with the warring factions alternately grabbing at the tiller, it’s going to be a sickening, zigzag journey to oblivion.
Whither the American Dream?
Obviously, I wouldn’t have taken the trouble to write this piece if I had no hope for our country finding its footing again. But I’m under no illusions; the odds of success seem long at best. For me, it seems like some elusive, Pythoneque quest for the mythical Holy Grail. Only in this case, the sought-after treasure is the soon-to-be-lost American Dream. That dream seemed closer to a birthright a generation ago: the notion that any American, regardless of gender or background, if they were willing to work hard, could get a good education and achieve a reasonable measure of middle-class success and personal fulfillment. It seems almost laughable to say it out loud now. But trust me, I’m not laughing.
Frank Capra Meets Aaron Sorkin
Maybe it’s the eternal optimist in me — and the storyteller — but I’ll end on something close to a hopeful, Capraesque note, or what passes for such in today’s Hollywood. One of my college-age son’s favorite television shows is HBO’s The Newsroom. In the show, Aaron Sorkin superbly illuminated the gaping chasm in thoughtful, serious cable news, and Jeff Daniels flat-out nailed the role of Will McEvoy, the centrist news anchor on a quixotic quest to make America informed again (MAIA?). So in the spirit of cultural rants, politically correct or otherwise, I give you Will McEvoy for your viewing pleasure, on why America is not the greatest country in the world. And how it used to be — and, presumably, could be again.
