Achi news desk-
It had been clear for years that China was rising and rising—building railroads and airports and skyscrapers at a rate that put the United States to shame, buying the favor of poorer countries, filling the world with its goods— when, in April 2014. , I happened upon some news. CNBC said, citing “a new study by the world’s leading statistical agencies,” that China’s fastest-growing economy would rank first in the world, surpassing the United States, as soon as the end of the year. Our century-plus reign as the world’s richest nation was over, or about to be. What a run we had!
But the study, which used a controversial methodology, turned out to be wrong. It interested me less than something else I learned when I started poking around the internet to put it into some kind of context. I found that most Americans think that China already is have become economically better for us. And they had thought that — wrongly — for several years.
In 2011, Gallup polled Americans on the question of whether the United States, China, the European Union, Japan, Russia, or India were the leading economic power in the world. More than 50 percent answered China, while less than 35 percent said the United States. Those numbers held when Gallup did the same poll the next year and the following year and in 2014, when the proportion of Americans who chose China rose to 52 percent and the proportion who chose America fell to 31 percent. That’s a huge difference, especially given its inaccuracy.
China’s economy is still lagging behind ours, although Americans have been reluctant to admit it. In 2020, when China was weighted as the cradle of the coronavirus pandemic, 50 percent of Americans indeed saw our economy as the stronger of the two. But that rediscovered swagger was short-lived. In 2021, he gave 50 percent of the crown back to China. Last year, Americans saw the economies as inherently connected.
A fundamental misperception of global affairs by Americans is not surprising. Too many, if not the majority, of us are reluctant to look or think beyond our shores. But this particular misperception shocked and fascinated me: Traditionally, we had been a nation so confident, even misguided, infatuated with our military might (and often too quick to w used), clueless with our foreign aid, schooled in stories – true ones. — about how desperately foreigners wanted to make new lives here and what extraordinary risks they took to do so. We saw ourselves as peerless, and we spoke a distinctive American vocabulary of infinite possibility, boundless optimism, and a better tomorrow.
american dream. American exceptionalism. Land of opportunity. Endless border. Manifest fate. Those were the pretty expressions I grew up with. We were inventors, explorers, explorers. Putting the first man on the moon wasn’t just a matter of bragging rights – although that was true, and we bragged about it plenty. It was also an act of self-definition, an affirmation of American identity. We stretched the parameters of the navigational universe the way we stretch the parameters of everything else.
That perspective was obviously a romantic one, achieved through a selective reading of the past. It disregarded the experiences of many Black Americans. It reduced the extent to which they and other minorities were excluded from all this invention and exploration. He was mixing self-congratulatory fiction with fact. And it probably made a stronger impression on me than on some of my peers because of my particular family history. My father’s parents were uneducated immigrants who found in the United States exactly what they had left Southern Italy for: greater material comfort, greater economic stability, and a broader future for their children, including my father, who received a scholarship to an Ivy League School, went on to earn an MBA, and became a senior partner at one of the largest accounting firms in the country. He put a heated in-ground pool in the back yard. He put me and my three siblings in private schools. Our mother put in a mink. And he pinched himself the whole time.
It was true though that the idea of the United States as an unparalleled engine of social mobility and producer of wealth influenced many Americans, who expected their children to do better than they had done and to their children’s children do even better. That was the mythology, anyway. Sure, we hit lows, but we climbed out of them. We endured doubts, but we fought back. The turmoil of the late 1960s, the degradation of Richard Nixon from the presidency, and gas lines, international humiliation, and the stagnation of Jimmy Carter’s presidency gave way in 1980 to the election of Ronald Reagan, who declared it was “morning again in America” and found plenty of voters eager to welcome that dawn, to reconnect with an optimism that seemed more credible and fundamentally American than deviations from it.
I no longer find that optimism around me. In its place is a crisis of confidence, a pervasive sense among most Americans that our best days are behind us, and that our problems are mounting faster than we can find solutions for them. It is a violent rupture of our national psyche. It’s a whole new American pessimism.
Well, maybe not entirely new. In Democracy in America, published in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville noted a persistent unsatisfied longing among Americans, who, he wrote, “are forever brooding over advantages they do not have.” He found Americans unusually attuned to their misfortunes, and that made (and still does) sense: With great promises come great disappointments. Unlimited dreams are bound to be unattainable.
Even in periods of American history that we associate with prosperity and tranquility, such as the 1950s, there were rumors and disillusionment: Rebel Without a Cause, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. And the late 1960s and early 70s were an oxymoronic vestige of surging hope for necessary change and certainty that the entire American enterprise was corrupt. There were strong and decisive calls for dignity, equality, and justice. There were also cities on fire and murders. But the general story – the general trend – of the United States in the second half of the 20th century was progress.
Then, in 2001, the Twin Towers fell. In 2008, the global economy almost collapsed. By 2012, I noticed that our “shining city on a hill,” to use one of Reagan’s favorite terms about the United States, was shrouded in a fog that would not lift. In June of that year, Jeb Bush visited Manhattan; having breakfast with several dozen journalists, including me; and pondering about the country’s declining situation and fortunes. Perhaps because his political life was on hiatus at the time – he had finished his two terms as governor of Florida and his 2016 presidential campaign was still years away – he allowed himself a lethargy he wouldn’t otherwise have. “We are in very difficult times at the moment, very different times than we have been,” he said, and while that was already more depressing than the usual outlook of mainstream politicians, his following words were even darker: “We in decline.”
In the years that followed, I paid more and more attention to evidence that supported his appraisal, which mirrored my own. I was struck by how tentative and tentative President Barack Obama seemed by the second year of his second term, when he often downplayed the smallness, not the greatness, of his place in history, as he told David Remnick, editor The New Yorker, that every president is “part of a long-lasting story. We are trying to get our paragraph right. ” “Mr. President,” my New York Times Her colleague Maureen Dowd wrote in response, “I’m trying to get my paragraph right. You need to think more.”
Of course, when Obama have think more, he had run afoul of a polarized and paralyzed American political system – which had turned “hope and change” into tweak and tinker. Obama’s longtime adviser, David Axelrod, told the Times‘ Michael Shear: “I think pretending that ‘It’s morning in America’ is misreading the times.”
That was in 2014, when I registered and explored the revelation that so many Americans thought China was richer than we were. Around the same time, I also noticed a long memo from prominent Democratic political strategist Doug Sosnik at Politics. He noticed that for 10 consecutive years, the percentage of Americans who believed that the United States was on the wrong track had been higher than the percentage who thought it was on the right track. “At the root of Americans’ anger and alienation is the belief that the American dream is no longer attainable,” Sosnik wrote. “For the first time in the history of our country, there is more social mobility in Europe than in the United States.”
That “first time” was not a seamless sacrifice. Since then, the negative markers have multiplied, and the negative mood has intensified. The fog over our shining city will not lift. Almost every year from 2000 to the present, the suicide rate has increased. A kind of nihilism has spread, “a rot on the soul of our nation,” as Mike Allen wrote last year in his Axios circular summarizing a Wall Street Journal/NORC poll that tracked the collapse of faith in American institutions and the abandonment of tradition and traditional values. Only 38 per cent of respondents said patriotism was very important, in contrast to 70 per cent of respondents from a similar group. Journal/The NBC survey a quarter of a century earlier, in 1998.
Recognizing those dynamics means understanding current American politics, where so many politicians – presidential candidates included – whip up less support by talking about the country’s bright future than by warning of the apocalypse if the other side wins. They are not an explanation of American glory. They are bulwarks against American ruin.
