The most arresting news of the week has been the Wall Street Journal poll that revealed deep strains of American pessimism. Values like patriotism, religion, hard work and the desire to have children are on the wane. I find this more infuriating than depressing. Don’t people realize how impossibly lucky we are? Don’t they understand the rigor necessary to keep a democracy afloat? Don’t they know that pessimism, especially of the feckless lazy variety, is carcinogenic?
This unnecessary and annoying American despond is a result of these factors, in no particular order:
The Media
Journalists present the world as a vail of tears. As Amanda Ripley argues today in this wonderful WaPo column, optimism is a tough sell in newsrooms. I could fill Sanity Clause for the next ten years with the hopeful stories that haven’t been deemed interesting by editors (“sexy” was the operative term) or, sadly, by readers (the editors were usually right). When I was writing a weekly column, I tried to give a shout-out to a hopeful program or a new idea or a good person every couple of months, just to cleanse the bile that “news” left in my innards. As Ripley writes:
Hope is more like a muscle than an emotion. It’s a cognitive skill, one that helps people reject the status quo and visualize a better way. If it were an equation, it would look something like: hope = goals + road map + willpower. “Hope is the belief that your future can be brighter and better than your past and that you actually have a role to play in making it better,” according to Casey Gwinn and Chan Hellman in their book, “Hope Rising.”
Decades of research have now proved that hope, defined this way, can be reliably measured and taught. Using 12 questions, called the Hope Scale — a version of which you can take yourself here — more than 2,000 studies have now demonstrated that people with stronger hope skills perform better in school, sports and work. They manage illness, pain and injury better and score higher on assessments of happiness, purpose and self-esteem. Among victims of domestic violence, child abuse and other forms of trauma, hope appears to be one of the most effective antidotes yet studied.
Politicians
Hope used to be the default position in American politics. This was an optimistic country until sometime in the mid-1970s, according to the polls: most of us believed next year would be better. We were unique among nations in that way. The most successful American Presidents of the past century were optimists. Their messages—from “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” to “Morning in America” to“I still believe in a place called Hope”—were beloved by voters. Joe Biden has an old-fashioned American patriotism, too. I love it when he says that we can accomplish anything because, “This is the United States of America.” [Emphasis his.] But Biden doesn’t seem to have much impact on the prevailing darkness. Part of the problem is the DNA of his political party: Democrats tend to emphasize grievances and perceived “structural” inequities—too many too rich folk, too many racists, sexists, homophobes etc etc etc—and rarely celebrate the freedom, happiness and financial success that our system of regulated free enterprise has wrought.
The Republicans, the party of business, were usually more optimistic. You have to be optimistic if you’re going to start a business. But not Donald Trump, whose apocalyptic show-biz pessimism—as Karen Tumulty points out here—has so distorted the perspective of his followers that it stands as a major threat to the Republic. Trump has friends and allies in the Fox News faux-fabulists—I’m looking at you Tucker Carlson—and assorted radio charlatans who deploy chicken-little scenarios to scare their hordes into hating anyone who doesn’t look like them.
[I would hope some enterprising political action committee would fund the positioning of “I hate Trump Passionately—Tucker Carlson” billboards throughout the South and midwestern heartlands this year.]
I love Joe Biden’s humanity but, as a fellow geezer, I fear that he is just too old—and too closely tied to sourpuss Democratic interest groups—to successfully sell a message of optimism, especially in this atmosphere. To be credible, that message has to come from someone younger. It was one thing when Barack Obama promoted “Hope and Change.” His very existence—a black man whose middle name was Hussein, running for President—said something optimistic about the country. He exuded energy and seemed prepared to do something about it. Even when Biden has a major success—the infrastructure bill—one fears he might have a heart attack if he ever stuck a shovel in the ground, even a ceremonial one. Sure, Grandpa Joe is optimistic. He’s had a good life. His grandkids don’t have to swim to school. The grass is still green in the far pasture. He should go there. (See below re kids.)
The road seems wide open for a vigorous politician in either party who is defiantly, but realistically, optimistic about America.
American Ozio
In The Discourses, Machiavelli posits two values that compete for the soul of a republic. One is virtu, a self-evident attribute that he associates with intellectual rigor and military discipline. The other is ozio, or indolence. At one point he writes, “Ozio is the greatest enemy of a republic.” Machiavelli was worried that a republic wouldn’t hold together if it were not facing a perceived existential crisis.
We’ve been living in the Golden Age of Ozio since the end of World War II. Oh, there have been terrible moments along the way. There were wars—most of them far away. There was 9/11. There was January 6. There were a million Covid deaths. But the prevailing peace and prosperity have been world-historic in nature. And the attendant relaxation has been notable: the couch-potatoization, video-game-zombification, supersized cholesterol-laden, industrialization of sports gambling; the don’t bother me, I’m too busy hating people like you on TV miasma we’ve been slogging through.
After 9/11, I spent the next dozen years learning from, and embedding with the U.S. military. It was among the most valuable reporting I’ve done. The Army and Marine Captains—I love Captains—would rag me about my swollen gut, my intellectual sloppiness (“The answer to your question, Klein, is in the piece on Full-Spectrum Warfare in Military Review which we asked you to read, but you clearly didn’t.”) and even my propensity to wear loafers (“Klein, you’re too lazy to tie your shoes.”) These were the most impressive American government employees I’d ever come across—and even more so when I began to embed with them downrange in Iraq and Afghanistan. The mission was creepy, but they did us proud.
It seemed obvious that they retained crucial American values—especially of service, sacrifice, responsibility, community—that the rest of us were losing. As a result, I became active in a political action committee called With Honor, which funds campaigns for the House by post-9/11 veterans of both parties who agree to sign a pledge to be part of a bipartisan caucus called For Country. (The caucus has more than twenty members currently. With Honor also supported the campaign of Wes Moore for governor of Maryland.) I wrote a book called Charlie Mike—which means Continue the Mission in military radio jargon—about the sterling qualities of this generation of veterans. People like Wes Moore and Adam Kinzinger and Elaine Luria and Abigail Spanberger and Dan Bacon are the reason why I’m not so pessimistic about our future.
But more needs to be done. An ethic of national service—real service like the military, but not limited to that—has to be reestablished in the country. I’m going to write more about this in the future because I consider it absolutely essential. To offer just one example: we need to rethink police service, raise its status as a path to civic leadership for young people, maybe even establish an elite national police academy to cultivate the very best candidates, a West Point for cops. The Police Corps was a great program—initiated by Clinton, killed by George W—that offered scholarship money and veterans’ preference at select law schools in return for four years of service as a police officer after graduation from college. It had the best police training program I’ve ever seen. We should bring it back. I could give other such examples, and will over time. (Ah, there I go again, being hopeful.)
An overweening sense of comfort is not healthy for a republic. An ethic of service and sacrifice is.
Are The Kids All Right?
According to this Brookings study, they’re overwhelmingly Democratic. And they’re voting in greater numbers than ever before. They care about abortion and climate change. They don’t like DeSantian “anti-woke” campaigns. But the Wall Street Journal shows a different, more pessimistic picture:
Only 23% of adults under age 30 said that having children was very important.
And they don’t value hard work or patriotism very much, either. I may be an old curmudgeon but that seems rather solipsistic to me. I don’t know how you sustain a society without hard work and procreation and, yes, patriotism—which, in its finest form, is the notion that we’re all in this together, that we’re part of something larger than ourselves.
Patriotism
The trouble is, patriotism has been given a bad name by the Trumpsters. They’ve taken over the American flag as their symbol, which is kind of ironic since they don’t seem to have much faith in basic principles like truth, democracy (especially election results) and the rule of law. As the conservative legal scholar Edward Luttig said at the University of Georgia last week—hat tip to Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark:
With the former president’s and his Republican Party’s determined denial of January 6, their refusal to acknowledge that the former president lost the 2020 presidential election fair and square, and their promise that the 2024 election will not be “stolen” from them again as they maintain it was in 2020, America’s Democracy and the Rule of Law are in constitutional peril — still. And there is no end to the threat in sight….
We are a house divided and our poisonous politics is fast eating away at the fabric of our society….
The Republican Party has made its decision that the war against America’s Democracy and the Rule of Law it instigated on January 6 will go on, prosecuted to its catastrophic end.
One small symbolic gesture we real patriots can make is to take back the American flag. I have no decals of any sort on my car, but I plan to put two on my rear bumper. This one
And this one:
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I've been very much enjoying Joe Klein's take on our current political situation. I read the WSJ article earlier in the week, and I do think there are some other factors to consider:
1) I agree that the kids may not be alright, but I have empathy. Given how uncertain the current economic outlook is--and of course the very real anxiety over the impact climate change is likely to have---I don't blame young people for being hesitant to start families. I also have serious questions about how this WSJ survey is worded. I'm not sure I'd consider "having children" to be a fundemental personal value, let alone a value thats somehow essential to the "American character." I think it would have been a lot more intstructive to ask the question in the form of a prioritization.
2) I am also deeply concerned about how pessimistic and cynical the younger generation is. Its worrying to have young people so disilusioned with politics and the established institutions of our democracy. Its very likely that a large number of these potential voters will just be turned off from civic engagement from a very young age. That said, I also empathise with them...imagine a hypothetical kid turning 25 this year. If this young person became politically aware sometime in high school (say as a 15 or 16 year old in 2013 ro 2014) they would have lived most of their politically/socially aware life in an era that does little to inspire optimism about our grand.democratic experiment.
3) Yes the media doesn't help...but hasn't that always been the case? When has there not been handwringing about sensational journalism and the "if it bleeds it leads" mentality of newsrooms? I think whats far more damaging is the corrosiveness of social media that has amplified all that negativity in unimaginably harmful ways.
I fully agree on the issue of how the Democrats have ceded patriotism to the Republicans. Its a huge, huge problem. I think far to many Dems (especially liberal activists) find outward expressions of patriotism somehow hokey or unsophisticated.
At the end of the day voters want to feel good about their country. And if Dems can't figure out a way to reclaim patriotism minus the simplistic and natavistic jingoism of the nationalistic right we're all in deep, deep trouble.