The New American Pessimism

It had been clear for years that China was rising and rising—building rail lines and airports and skyscrapers at a rate that put the United States to shame, purchasing the favor of poorer countries, filling the world with its wares—when, in April 2014, I happened upon a bit of news. CNBC, citing a “new study from the world’s leading statistical agencies,” reported that China’s rapidly growing economy would rank first in the world, surpassing the United States’, by as soon as the end of the year. Our century-plus reign as the world’s wealthiest nation was over, or about to be. What a run we’d had!

But the study, which used debatable methodology, turned out to be wrong. It interested me less than something else I learned when I began poking around the internet to put it in some sort of context. I discovered that most Americans thought that China already had become our economic superior. And they’d thought that—erroneously—for several years.

In 2011, Gallup polled Americans on the question of whether the United States, China, the European Union, Japan, Russia, or India was the leading economic power in the world. More than 50 percent answered China, while fewer than 35 percent said the United States. Those numbers held when Gallup did the same polling the next year and the next and in 2014, when the portion of Americans choosing China rose to 52 percent and the portion choosing America dipped to 31 percent. That’s a whopping differential, especially considering its wrongness.

China’s economy still lags behind ours, although Americans have been reluctant to recognize that. In 2020, when China was pilloried as the cradle of the coronavirus pandemic, 50 percent of Americans indeed saw our economy as the mightier of the two. But that rediscovered swagger was short-lived. In 2021, 50 percent gave the crown back to China. Last year, Americans saw the economies as essentially tied.  

[From the May 1888 issue: What is pessimism?]

A fundamental misperception of global affairs by Americans isn’t surprising. Too many, if not most, of us are disinclined to look or think beyond our shores. But this particular misperception startled and fascinated me: We’d traditionally been such a confident, even cocky, nation, enamored of our military might (and often too quick to use it), showy 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 distinctively American vocabulary of infinite possibility, boundless optimism, and better tomorrows.

American dream. American exceptionalism. Land of opportunity. Endless frontier. Manifest destiny. Those were the pretty phrases that I grew up with. We were inventors, expanders, explorers. Putting the first man on the moon wasn’t just a matter of bragging rights—though it was indeed that, and we bragged plenty about it. It was also an act of self-definition, an affirmation of American identity. We stretched the parameters of the navigable universe the way we stretched the parameters of everything else.

That perspective, obviously, was a romanticized one, achieved through a selective reading of the past. It discounted the experiences of many Black Americans. It minimized the degree to which they and other minorities were shut out from all of this inventing and exploring. It mingled self-congratulatory fiction with fact. And it probably imprinted itself more strongly 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’d left Southern Italy for: more material comfort, greater economic stability, and a more expansive future for their children, including my father, who got a scholarship to an Ivy League school, went on to earn an M.B.A., and became a senior partner in one of the country’s biggest accounting firms. He put a heated in-ground pool in the backyard. He put me and my three siblings in private schools. He put our mother in a mink. And he pinched himself all the while.

It was nonetheless true that the idea of the United States as an unrivaled engine of social mobility and generator of wealth held sway with many Americans, who expected their children to do better than they’d done and their children’s children to do even better. That was the mythology, anyway. Sure, we hit lows, but we climbed out of them. We suffered doubts, but we snapped back. The tumult of the late 1960s, Richard Nixon’s degradation of the presidency, and the gas lines, international humiliation, and stagflation of Jimmy Carter’s presidency gave way, in 1980, to the election of Ronald Reagan, who declared that it was “morning again in America” and found an abundance of voters eager to welcome that dawn, to reconnect with an optimism that seemed more credibly and fundamentally American than deviations from it.

I don’t detect that optimism around me anymore. 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 multiplying faster than we can find solutions for them. It’s 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 perpetually unsatisfied yearning in Americans, who, he wrote, “are forever brooding over advantages they do not possess.” He found Americans unusually attuned to their misfortunes, and that made (and still makes) sense: With big promises come big disappointments. Boundless dreams are bound to be unattainable.

Even in periods of American history that we associate with prosperity and tranquility, like the 1950s, there were rumblings and disenchantment: Rebel Without a Cause, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. And the late 1960s and early ’70s were an oxymoronic braid of surgent hope for necessary change and certainty that the whole American enterprise was corrupt. There were headstrong and heady demands for dignity, for equality, for justice. There were also cities on fire and assassinations. But the overarching story—the general trend line—of the United States in the second half of the 20th century was progress.

[Read: The patron saint of political violence]

Then, in 2001, the Twin Towers fell. In 2008, the global economy nearly collapsed. By 2012, I noticed that our “shining city on a hill,” to use one of Reagan’s favorite terms for the United States, was enveloped in a fog that wouldn’t lift. In June of that year, Jeb Bush visited Manhattan; had breakfast with several dozen journalists, including me; and mused about the country’s diminished position and fortunes. Perhaps because his political life was then on pause—he’d finished his two terms as Florida governor and his 2016 presidential campaign was still years away—he allowed himself a bluntness that he might not have otherwise. “We’re in very difficult times right now, very different times than we’ve been,” he said, and while that was already more downbeat than mainstream politicians’ usual prognostications, his following words were even darker: “We’re in decline.”

In the years that followed, I paid greater and greater heed to evidence that supported his appraisal, which mirrored my own. I was struck by how tempered and tentative President Barack Obama seemed by the second year of his second term, when he often mulled the smallness, not the largeness, of his place in history, telling David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, that each president is just “part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.” “Mr. President,” my New York Times colleague Maureen Dowd wrote in response, “I am just trying to get my paragraph right. You need to think bigger.”

Of course, when Obama had thought bigger, he’d bucked up against an American political system that was polarized and paralyzed—that had turned “hope and change” into tweak and tinker. Obama’s longtime adviser David Axelrod told the Times’ Michael Shear: “I think to pretend that ‘It’s morning in America’ is a misreading of the times.”

That was in 2014, when I registered and explored the revelation that so many Americans thought China was wealthier than we were. Around the same time, I also noticed a long memo by the prominent Democratic political strategist Doug Sosnik in Politico. He observed that for 10 years running, the percentage of Americans who believed that the United States was on the wrong track had exceeded the percentage who thought it was on the right track. “At the core of Americans’ anger and alienation is the belief that the American dream is no longer attainable,” Sosnik wrote. “For the first time in our country’s history, there is more social mobility in Europe than in the United States.”

That “first time” turned out to be no fleeting aberration. Since then, the negative markers have multiplied, and the negative mood has intensified. The fog over our shining city won’t lift. Almost every year from 2000 to the present, the suicide rate has increased. A kind of nihilism has spread, a “rot at the very soul of our nation,” as Mike Allen wrote last year in his Axios newsletter summarizing a Wall Street Journal/NORC poll that charted both the collapse of faith in American institutions and the abandonment of tradition and traditional values. Only 38 percent of respondents said that patriotism was very important, in contrast with 70 percent of respondents from a similar Journal/NBC survey a quarter century earlier, in 1998.

To recognize those dynamics is to understand America’s current politics, in which so many politicians—presidential candidates included—whip up support less by talking about the brightness of the country’s future than by warning of the apocalypse if the other side wins. They’re not clarions of American glory. They’re bulwarks against American ruin.

This essay was adapted from the forthcoming The Age of Grievance.