OPINION:
For most of our history, Americans have been relentlessly positive and optimistic, as a people would have to be to have settled a continental wilderness, created most of the modern world and be the most powerful nation in history. Unfortunately, that may be changing. We seem to be losing our natural and welcome positive attitude toward the world.
Last week, our friends at Politico released the results of a survey of more than 2,000 adults (margin of error 2.2%). The most shocking responses? About half (46%) said the American dream no longer exists. About a quarter (28%) said they weren’t sure whether it still exists. Similarly, half the respondents said the country’s best days are behind us.
Unfortunately, these responses are no different from other survey results we have seen. One can hardly blame the citizenry; they get a steady dose of negativity, pessimism and vitriol from their political leaders, academia and the legacy media. Our national and political discourse has deteriorated and in some instances devolved into violence.
Is the American dream dead? Of course not. The millions of immigrants, legal and otherwise, who endlessly besiege our shores are a simple and powerful testament to the enduring appeal of the American life. Few natives to the United States are prepared to go elsewhere, no matter what they might say.
What it does mean is that our political class needs to a better job of capturing, distilling, speaking about and advancing the fundamentally positive nature of the American dream. It is time for the nattering nabobs of negativism to give way again to the very real promise of the American dream.
We have endured now nearly a decade of a pretty constant diet of negativity about the United States and its future. Despite that, the irreducible reality is this: For better or worse (and I think it is decidedly for the better), the United States remains the last, best hope of mankind. We set the tone and the pace on this planet with respect to science, technology, medicine, economic enterprise, art, music, language, movies, statecraft and on and on. There may come a day when some other nation replaces us as the indispensable nation, but now is not that day, and tomorrow looks like another day of American indispensability as well.
The good news is that we are about to start yet another presidential campaign. Hopefully, this one will be different. The American people need a message of hope, a message of optimism, a message that calls forth the better angels of our nature, a message that summons the American greatness that is within each of us.
America has always been a fundamentally optimistic nation where tomorrow and next month and next year are always going to be better and more prosperous than the present day. The candidate who can best capture, curate and project that easy confidence in the enduring greatness of the nation will win the presidency in 2028. Americans cannot and will not long endure a steady regime of recriminations, pessimism and defeatism.
Individual and national decay is a choice, just like individual and national achievement and excellence are a choice. They are not inevitable, they are not the product of forces beyond our ability to control. Our fates, both national and individual, are our own to choose and to make.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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