We are a sick nation in many ways, and I am not just referring to COVID-19. There is a cloud over America. It has gotten darker during the four years of the Trump administration, but it was there before.
It is a cloud growing from a decline in trust, in civility, and in a sense of vision of what our nation can be, what we can be. A decline in a sense of purpose and hope. To be sure, there are bright and inspiring sources of light: healthcare workers risking their lives in hospitals, men and women in food banks and food stores, teachers coping with challenging and risky circumstances, millions seeking jobs, valiantly, while taking care of their needy families.
“Make America Great Again” has become a hollow slogan. Yes, there have been a few statistically valid accomplishments over the past four years which the Trump administration can claim. Low unemployment numbers, though we have to acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of people are dropping out of work, and many new jobs come with compensation levels well below what people had before.
However, for many if not most, the quality of life is far from what they would choose. And, their hope for the future is low.
Our nation has always thrived on an uplifting vision, a big dose of ambition and a sense of purpose. We haven’t always fulfilled it, not by a long shot, but we have had a star to which we strove and our leaders have called us to reach for it together.
This erosion of vision, of ambition and of purpose has reached a peak level today with the simultaneous challenges presented by the pandemic, the resulting severe economic downturn and the moral turpitude and erosion of the very concept of truth embodied by the current President of the United States.
We should recognize that this cloud of pessimism and of doubt, represents an enormous change over the last 60 years. In 1958, the renowned historian C. Vann Woodward recalled Professor Arthur Schlesinger’s then-recent attempt to define the American character as being “bottomed upon the profound conviction that nothing in the world is beyond its power to accomplish.” In this, Woodward writes, Schlesinger “gave expression to one of the great American legends, the legend of success and invincibility. Almost every major collective effort, even those thwarted temporarily, succeeded in the end. American history is a success story. Why should such a nation not have a profound conviction that nothing in the world is beyond its power to accomplish? The American people have never known the chastening experience of being on the losing side of a war. Success and victory are national habits of mind.”
In 1960, Vann Woodward called on historians to “penetrate the legend without destroying the ideal, who can dispel the illusion of pretended virtue without denying the genuine virtues. Such historians must have learned that virtue has never been defined by national or regional boundaries, and that morality and rectitude are not the monopolies of factions or parties. Their studies would show the futility of erecting intellectual barricades against unpopular ideas, of employing censorship and repression against social criticism, and of imposing the ideas of the conqueror upon defeated people by force of arms. The history they write would also constitute a warning that an overwhelming conviction in the righteousness of a cause is no guarantee of its ultimate triumph, and that the policy which takes into account the possibility of defeat is more realistic than one that assumes the inevitability of victory.”
Yes, this erosion of trust and confidence and hope has been a long time coming. It has developed over the course of more than 50 years. Over this half-century, our nation has witnessed a profound loss of innocence as we have discovered that all wars are not winnable (witness Vietnam), others are misbegotten (witness Iraq) and some never end (witness Afghanistan).
We’ve lost a sense of invulnerability as we’ve felt the devastating impact of the pandemic and seen terrorists attack our own country and others. Vulnerable, too, as we watch China grow to become the largest economy in the world, with strong autocratic leadership, and we face a greater number of what we are defining as “enemies” than ever before.
The period has been marked by a sharp erosion of trust in our institutions, including religion, business and government, starting with Nixon’s Watergate, Clinton’s lying and exploitation of a young intern, and now Donald Trump.
It has been abetted by the increasing polarization of politics, even impacting people’s families, enabled by gerrymandering and the far greater impact of big money in influencing the leadership of the country.
It has been fueled by increasing income inequality and by a sense that the world is not as fair as it used to be and that the opportunity for the next generation to do better than the current one has become small. Media has become increasingly fractionated, enabling all of us to hear what we want to hear, almost always in stark opposition to, often demonizing, the other side.
To be sure, there have been events and leaders that have provided hope and evidence that, halting as it is, progress is possible. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union (even though it led to what proved to be a far too self-congratulatory conclusion that the West had won and that democracy and capitalism would prevail across the world).
We’ve been lifted by the greatly increased and long overdue acceptance of the LGBTQ community, offering legitimate hope that positive change can happen. Many of us were lifted by Obama’s being elected President, feeling this was an indication that opportunity was available to people regardless of their race.
At this moment, there is a greater sense of realism and more honest confrontation of the facts than I have ever before experienced. This is a good thing for facing the reality of where we stand is the starting point to make things better.
We know we continue to face the challenge of racism which we thought had been largely disposed of. We know we’re vulnerable to disease which, before now, we’ve talked about only as historical incidents (e.g., the Spanish Flu of 1918) as if they were just things of the past. We—at least most of us—recognize the threat of climate change which has contributed to this year’s wildfires in the western United States, hurricanes in the Gulf and flooding in Iowa. We know, at least we should know, that we face an overhanging threat of nuclear annihilation. We must work imaginatively and with determination to reach agreement among all nations to control this means of wiping out life on earth as we know it.
Yes, events over the past 60 years have, for almost all of us, removed any aura of innocence. Indeed, I would say our task now is to recognize the rightness of our founding ideals without indulging in hubris or allowing it to manifest itself in trying to impose our way of life on other nations. We’ve seen the price to be paid of pursuing a moral crusade on a worldwide scale. We must have the wisdom to chart a course of foreign policy between the perilous extremes of isolationism and world crusade. Both extreme courses will always have powerful advocates; neither can be regarded as a dead issue.
Yes, a cloud covers our nation today and indeed the world; a cloud of uncertainty, cynicism and hopelessness. We need not, we must not, allow ourselves to wallow in this. We need a new realistic vision, a new ambition to achieve our noblest ideals. We need leaders who will carry this mission forward with conviction, with courage and with belief in their fellow citizens—all of them.
We have had this sense of vision and purpose in our nation before, a vision brought to life by concrete decisions, actions and achievement. We need such a vision and sense of purpose and actions to realize it in the next administration. Actions such as infrastructure improvements providing millions of new jobs, quality health care and educational opportunity available to all, regardless of income working together with other nations to attack climate change, seeking resolution of disagreements with adversaries and working with them where we need to—for example, on nuclear proliferation. We must mend our relationships with allies to achieve common purposes. Perhaps above all, in our relationships and dialogue with one another, we must be civil and display common decency. That's the only way we can come together to accomplish what we need to.
We need to look at one another as fellow travelers in the pursuit of a better country devoted to fulfilling the ideals embedded in the founding of our nation.
We can do better, much better. I for one am optimistic that we can and will begin to turn the table on the erosion of Vision, Purpose and Hope under a new Biden administration. It will not be easy and it will not happen overnight but we must and can begin and I think we will.
