America 250 isn't as grim as it seems

Americans are down on their country. But they like their cities, towns, and communities a lot better.

Americans aren’t in the mood to celebrate the 250th year of the Declaration of Independence. But a humble observance might be more appropriate than a roaring party, anyway.

The semiquincentennial, as it’s formally known, arrives as Americans are pondering a clumsy war with Iran that seems to have empowered a rogue state known for espousing “death to America.” Some critics even think America lost the war. The president who launched that war, Donald Trump, is deeply unpopular, with a majority of Americans saying he goes too far on most important matters.

The portion of Americans saying they’re proud of their country is at the lowest level in the 25 years Gallup has been asking the question. The percentage satisfied with the direction of the country is a lowly 21%, a level typical during recessions. Sixty-four percent of Americans think the nation’s democracy is failing.

[Trump’s weekend wars could last for awhile]

It’s not all Trump. Most surveys gauging the national mood show a prolonged pessimistic turn that started with the financial crash in 2008 and the Great Recession that accompanied it.

So what’s to celebrate? Well, plenty, if you turn off the national news for a while and stop looking for trouble.

Americans seem to be a lot more satisfied with their own circumstances than with what they think is going on elsewhere in the country. Seventy-eight percent tell Gallup that they’re satisfied with their own personal lives, a number that’s just slightly below the historical average dating to 1979. The record high in this series didn’t occur way back in the Simpler Times of the 1980s or 1990s, but in January 2020, right before the Covid pandemic hit. As Trump began the fourth year of his first term, 90% of Americans said their lives were good.

[There’s a new kind of inflation to worry about]

Looking at these two charts together shows the growing disparity between Americans’ perceptions of their own lives compared with the nation as a whole.

It’s well understood that the United States has become an angrier and more partisan place as the media has fractured, the internet has given everybody a platform, and the outrage industry has metastasized to stoke every form of resentment. Trump’s own uberslogan—”make America great again”—implies that the nation has declined from some pinnacle moment when everything was better.

[The Weekly WTF: Algae and Iran conspire against Trump]

Look closer at the details, and that doesn’t hold up. The last big celebration of American heritage was the bicentennial, in 1976. America had just lost the Vietnam War, with nearly 60,000 dead and American prestige shattered. The Misery Index, which measures inflation and unemployment combined, was 14.5, nearly double the post-war average up to that point. That was genuine stagflation.

A bear market in stocks began in 1972, and it would take seven years for stocks to reach new highs. A Mideast oil crisis had just caused widespread gasoline shortages and revealed a dangerous reliance on foreign energy. The film Network popularized the rant, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

The United States eventually roared back from that low ebb. By the mid-1980s, the economy was humming and inflation was down. The United States romped over Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, restoring some global swagger. The collapse of the Soviet Union later that same year was an epic victory for capitalism and democracy. The late 1990s marked new highs in living standards.

If you’re combing the past for a high-water mark, you could make it 1988, at the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, or 2000, at the end of Bill Clinton’s. That gives you a Republican and a Democrat to thank for the memories. You could be ecumenical and pick both. Both years represented major improvement over conditions in 1976.

[The Trump economy is barely improving]

Of course, we have a lot now that we didn’t have then: new medical cures, smartphones, streaming, deeper space exploration, Reddit, Taylor Swift. We have new problems, too. Wealth inequality has been worsening for decades. It takes a bigger portion of income to buy a home. Rapid technological change locks some workers out of the labor force for good.

The worst development of the last few decades may be a new political class that doesn’t fix problems. The national debt only gets larger. Medicare and Social Security creep closer to insolvency. The federal minimum wage hasn’t risen in 17 years, but there have been six government shutdowns totaling 175 days during that time span.

Trump has driven home the sense of betrayal by saying he’ll get prices under control, then acknowledging that he never really cared about people’s affordability struggles.

What Americans really seem to be saying in all those surveys is that life in their communities is pretty good, but the higher up the chain you go, the worse it gets. They especially dislike the people running the country, and it probably doesn’t matter much whether they’re Republicans or Democrats.

At the federal level, America stinks. But at the local level, it’s pretty damn good. That’s where people hold their block parties and backyard barbecues, and those are the proper venues to celebrate the nation.

Enjoy a cartoon.

Cartoon by Bill Abbott

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