OPINION:
I was asked recently why I was such a homer for the United States despite our numerous and obvious defects. It’s a good question. What kind of case can really be made that staying in the United States is the right answer? Aren’t there better places to live?
There may indeed be better places to live, but it is not clear where those places might be.
Let’s start with something so contextual that it is not immediately obvious. The United States has been (for better or worse) the largest and most significant cultural global content provider for at least six decades, roughly since TV became ubiquitous. The world watches our movies and shows and plays our music. Apart from the threat from TikTok, that seems unlikely to change anytime soon.
English is now the world’s reserve language. Of course, English colonialism was essential in the linguistic colonization of the world, but the United States expanded and completed the process. Roughly 1.35 billion people speak English, and another billion or so speak English as a second language. By comparison, roughly 1.1 billion people speak Mandarin, almost all as a first language.
Just as English is the world’s reserve language, the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Despite everything else, the United States is the most economically powerful and dynamic nation on the planet. Our economy is so large that our poorest states have higher per capita gross domestic product than most nations in Europe. Of the 10 largest companies on the planet, eight are American.
How about education? Of the top 10 universities in the world, seven are in America and the other three are in England. There are about 1.2 million foreign students in American universities; about 300,000 American students are studying abroad. More than 70% of Nobel Prize recipients have been Americans. Since 1901, Americans have won 106 Nobel prizes for medicine. The nearest country is the United Kingdom, with 31.
Not surprisingly, the United States has led the way in vaccines of all types, including polio and measles and in everything from organ transplants to technology such as MRIs. The American health care system definitely needs improvement, but then again, so does every nation’s system. Although many advocate for the government to take over health care, the reality everywhere is that those with the most cash get the most care, irrespective of governmental arrangements.
What about technology? Whether you think about telephones, TVs, computers, putting people on the moon or artificial intelligence and robotics, America has led the planet with respect to technology for more than 150 years. No other nation is even remotely close.
Finally, let’s think about migration. On average, almost 3 million people migrate to the United States each year; less than a fifth of that number leave the country. It is safe to say that we could welcome almost as many people as we wanted each year. There does not seem to be a ceiling except that created by our own laws. No one is breaking down the doors to get into China.
None of this is designed to minimize or ignore our very real challenges, but rather to place all of them in the proper context. The reality is that the United States has a history of solving its problems and addressing the challenges it faces.
As difficult as it may be to imagine now, in the 1950s and 1960s, many people thought the Soviet Union was going to overtake the United States. In the 1970s, Arabs were going to run the world because of their perceived oil hegemony. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, the U.S. was fixated on the idea that Japan Inc. was destined to run the world.
In each instance, American optimism, vision and willingness to change where and when necessary led us to a better place. Think about our origin story: the Pilgrims at Plymouth. For good reason, the Pilgrim celebration remains the dominant narrative of Thanksgiving in our society. In 1621, in the wake of a bountiful harvest after a year of terrible sickness and unimaginable hardship, the Pilgrims set aside a day to give thanks to God for all of it — the good and the bad.
The easy thing for the Pilgrims to do would have been to head home. Only a people of great resilience and great confidence in their God could have survived that first year and gone on to build a continent.
We are, for good or ill, their heirs and successors. We should start acting like it.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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