Is America great?
When asked, the majority of poll respondents were split between two answers: “yes” (46 percent) and “it’s complicated” (48 percent).
“America has always been great for some but not for all.”
“America is not great but has the potential to be. We have never come to terms with our history: the genocide of native people, slavery, Jim Crow, the mistreatment of immigrants, the second class status of women and so on.”
Those who see greatness draw special attention to democratic institutions and the principles of freedom and diversity. History is more nuanced: elections have often been manipulated, voting rights denied, democracy thwarted and violence perpetrated. The divisions we see in America today have been with us from the beginning although they have ebbed and flowed (more in the decades before the Civil War, less during WWII which brought us together and more after).
Four recent books give some perspective.
Joseph S. Nye Jr., A Life in the American Century
Joanne B. Freeman, The Field Of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War
Nick Bryant, The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict With Itself
Peter Van Agtmael, Look At The U.S.A.
Every four years since 1788 we’ve done something very special in America. We’ve had an election to vote for President and Vice President, Senators, Congressmen, Governors, Mayors, and other local government officials. Diverse citizens from the Northeast, Southeast, Northwest, Southwest and the Heartland debate, argue, weigh the pros and cons. They say all politics is local but for a few weeks or months every four years we look beyond our noses and try to see our entire country from a distance to get a better picture of who we are as a people. And who we are is more complicated than what we see locally.
America is very much a racially diversified country. Over the past decade the white population has steadily declined while Hispanics, blacks and Asians have increased.
America has traditionally been more religious than most western countries but that is changing. According to an average of all 2023 Gallup polling, about three in four Americans said they identify with a specific religious faith. By far the largest proportion, 68%, identify with a Christian religion. But the fastest growing group since 1950 is “no religious preference” up from near zero to 22 percent.
While incomes and wealth have increased over time so has the level of inequality. In the past 60 years, America witnessed a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthiest families, increasing wealth inequality. In 1963, the wealthiest families had 36 times the wealth of families in the middle of the wealth distribution. By 2022, they had 71 times the wealth of families in the middle.
It’s no surprise that these large changes in race, religion, income and wealth inequality have increased divisions and in some cases led to violence. The recent assassination attempt on former President Trump and the January 6th assault on the Capitol that he inspired come to mind. What might not be as obvious is that America and its democracy has always been mired by violence. Four U.S. Presidents have been assassinated (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy). The 1960s was an especially deadly decade.
The results of elections, even close ones, were generally accepted until 2020. Kennedy won the 1960 election with “wafer-thin plurality” with believable allegations of election fraud in Chicago yet Nixon quickly conceded: “I want to say that one of the great features of America is that we have political contests and once the decision is made we unite behind the man who is elected.” Bush v. Gore was more contentious and eventually decided by the Supreme Court along ideological lines. Gore accepted the results.
“In the years after the Florida debacle, election skulduggery became the norm. Republicans, especially, turned redesigning congressional districts into a political art form. Gerrymandering upended the core idea of democracy, that voters should elect their representatives. Now politicians selected their voters.” (Bryant)
Today Donald Trump still disputes the results of the 2020 election.
New voting restrictions have cropped up this year as they have throughout our history. From the lack of polling places and unnecessarily burdensome rules to racially discriminatory gerrymandering voter rights are restricted in America to favor certain groups. “We’re the only advanced democracy that deliberately discourages people from voting,” said President Obama in 2016. (Bryant)
Elections are manipulated, voting rights denied, democracy thwarted, violence perpetrated more than they would be in a truly democratic country. Consider that Alaskan Republican congressman Don Young pushed Speaker John Boehner against a wall and threatened him with a knife over a disagreement about earmarks (items tacked onto a bill to benefit a legislator’s home state). (Freeman)
The future is uncertain. “So often we fall back on the comforting idea, derived from Enlightenment thinking, about the inevitability of progress, that America is moving, albeit haphazardly at times, towards becoming ‘a more perfect union’ … So often we have wanted to focus on the best of America and push its more unsightly characteristics to the periphery … The great American melting pot could so easily become a toxic stew, poisoned by the hatred of nativism. American democracy is more vulnerable to demagoguery than we assume, and demagogues periodically raise their heads.” (Bryant)
America’s complicated history shows up in our art and culture as exhibited by Peter Van Agtmael’s photographic memoir of the past two decades or so. (See How The American Dream Came to Represent Both a Utopia and a Dystopia)
In summary perhaps we can only say with Dickens that these are the best of times and the worst of times. If you really have an interest in exploring how today’s political divisions are connected to our complicated past, read the books and articles cited. Joseph S. Nye expresses guarded optimism in his book that chronicles his eight decades of experience.
“America has many problems—polarization, inequality, loss of trust, mass shootings, deaths of despair from drugs and suicide—just to name a few that make headlines. There is a case for pessimism. At the same time, we have survived worse periods in the 1890s, 1930s and the 1960s as I have described. For all our flaws, the U.S. is an innovative society that, in the past, has been able to recreate and reinvent itself. Maybe Gen Z can do it again. I hope so. We should be wary of counting too heavily on American exceptionalism, but my guarded optimism is described in this account of what it was like to live through the first eight decades of the American century.”
So, is America great? It’s complicated.