Finally! Someone wrote it, with perfect timing for America’s birthday.
Someone took a look at our country and said that despite its flaws, despite our furious disagreements, despite the ridiculous politics on both sides, despite Supreme Court rulings, the Jan. 6 attack, rising prices, crime rates and anything else you wish to add to the list, America remains a land of great promise.
Megan McArdle of The Washington Post had a column on its website headlined, “Why there’s reason to believe American democracy has a bright future.” And her first paragraph included this gem: “I am bullish about American democracy.”
Good for her. It’s a shame more of us don’t feel the same way, because there are signs of optimism for anyone who’s willing to look.
For conservatives, McArdle said that American investment money “appears to be undergoing a Great Unwokening” — a really clever phrase — and the Deep State which they revile is the same group that has finally validated the Hunter Biden laptop suspicions.
For liberals, she points out that the country got through “many sudden reversals of Supreme Court precedent, as well as the discovery of all sorts of new rights, under the Warren and Burger courts.” Further, disagreeing with the court’s rulings is not the same as “proving they are incompatible with a functioning democracy.”
Then there is former president Donald Trump. McArdle said he tried to bulldoze many things during his four years, but American institutions were up to the test. They bent a bit but held steady.
Liberals who fear Trump is the first of many right-wing presidential provocateurs should take heart in seeing that his would-be successors aren’t doing too well so far in the 2024 campaign.
But here’s the most important point of McArdle’s column: Many times during the last 247 years, Americans have had it worse than they do today. We tend to forget that.
We got past slavery and the Civil War. We got past the Great Depression and a number of serious financial panics before that. We adjusted 120 years ago as our agricultural economy gave way to a manufacturing economy.
We led the way to victory in World War II on two fronts. We won the Cold War. We made it through the 1960s, when protests over civil rights and the Vietnam War really did come close to tearing the country apart.
The challenges of today are numerous and serious. In the big picture, the main one is another unsettling economic transformation, this time to one centered on technology. It has already proven to be an immensely disruptive realignment.
Fortunately, Americans are good at figuring things out. It is the secret sauce of our endurance. This country didn’t become the envy of the world by chance. Its people worked at it.
McArdle made another excellent point that must not be overlooked: Most people in this country are good folks. This is beyond dispute.
“Watch Americans dealing with one another day to day and you will mostly see them going out of their way to be nice,” she wrote. “There are far more random acts of kindness in this country than there are drive-by shootings, and far more people acting with honesty and integrity, even when no one’s looking, than there are con men and thieves. We focus on the latter precisely because they are rare.
“Which is why, for all the bad, America is better than it thinks itself. And I dare to believe that, in the future, it will be better still.”
Jack Ryan, Enterprise-Journal
