The United States is the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world. Every week, hundreds of people risk life and limb to try to enter it. You have a strong economy, an open political system, and the most innovative companies on the planet. The rest of the world watches your movies, learns your language, copies your clothes.
Why, then, is the country so grouchy?
Listen to how your politicians talk. America has been “lost through inaction,” says John Delaney, a great hope of the Democratic moderates running for the party’s presidential nomination. “We’re so much better than this. We’re a country that used to do things.” Used to? I’d say that, as the home of Tesla, Netflix, Amazon, and Facebook, you’re still doing things. What other country is gearing up for a mission to Mars, for heaven’s sake?
Next to the other contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, though, Delaney sounds positively Panglossian. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio asserts that ordinary Americans are “falling behind” and that “the big corporations did that to you.” Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren says, “When you’ve got an economy that does great for those with money and isn’t doing great for everyone else, that is corruption, pure and simple.” Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke rails against “an economy that is rigged to corporations and to the very wealthiest.” Not to be outdone, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan tells us that “we’ve got kids literally laying in their own snot, with three-week-old diapers that haven’t been changed.”
The idea that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer goes back to Karl Marx’s theory of “immiseration.” It wasn’t true in his day, and it isn’t now. Yes, the rich are getting richer; but so are almost all Americans. A survey by the Federal Reserve shows income growth at all levels. True, plutocrats have made significant gains. But the jobs boom has also lifted people in the bottom decile as they shift from benefits into work. As President John F. Kennedy used to observe, in the days before the Democrats became addicted to grievance, the best route out of poverty is a secure job.
If equality matters more to you than prosperity, you won’t care about rising tides lifting all boats. Over the past 40 years, the poorest Americans have increased their wealth by a third (adjusting for inflation), but the wealthiest Americans have nearly tripled theirs. Then again, bear in mind that these are not static categories. Americans are continually leaving the bottom decile and rising up the charts, their places at the bottom taken by new arrivals.
That, incidentally, is the answer to those who claim that, while the world generally has become wealthier over the past generation, there has been stagnation for low-income workers in developed countries. For one thing, those low-income workers are not the same people: The men and women who sew your clothes, pick your fruit, and clean your streets are disproportionately likely to be reasonably recent immigrants. For another, measuring only income, rather than overall living standards, misses half the story.
Yes, there has been some slowdown in wages over the past 20 years, a consequence of the entry into the global market of hundreds of millions of new workers from previously closed and socialist economies, but that certainly doesn’t mean life is worse for the working classes in the West. Think back to how we lived 20 years ago. We could not have dreamed of carrying around as much information as we now do in the palms of our hands. Flights were vastly more expensive and usually needed to get booked through travel agents. If you wanted photographs, you had to buy and carry a camera, its roll of film you then needed to get developed in a specialist shop. There were perhaps a dozen TV channels, supplemented by video rental stores. The coffee in small towns often tasted like muddy water, though Starbucks was by then exploding across American cities. I won’t even try to describe the tea.
The utility of such things is hard to measure. An economist can’t put a price on the difference between good and bad tea, or more TV stations. But if that economist had to go back in a time machine to the 1990s and live there for a week, he would soon stop claiming that life has gotten no better.
Why, then, the doom and gloom? Those Democratic candidates, after all, are hardly outliers. They say what they say because they know voters want to hear it. As Marco Rubio put it when he pulled out of the Republican primaries in 2016, “No one wants optimism at the moment.” He was right. Donald Trump won the primaries and then the presidency by reflecting people’s grievances at them. Some of these grievances were understandable, but others seemed unconnected to the facts. 2015 was, for example, the first year in which more Mexicans crossed the American border southward than northward. Crime was not rising; it was falling. The economic recovery was underway. But few wanted to hear these things.
At least, back then, the Democrats were (as governing parties traditionally are) upbeat. Now, bizarrely, the two parties compete in their alarmism. Democrats, being in opposition, are understandably seeking to spread despair. But Trump, though he claims credit for the economic boom, somehow manages to campaign as though he were in opposition too. He always accuses the system of being rigged, taking to Twitter to castigate government employees, and he rails against the establishment, the “fake news” media, illegal immigrants, and criminal gangs.
Since your politicians are so relentlessly miserable, perhaps you will allow a foreign politician to make a couple of observations. America still accounts for nearly a quarter of the world’s economy. Your armed forces could take on the next three largest militaries combined. You have more people in work than at any time since the 1950s. Your stock exchange is robust. Gross domestic product figures from the last quarter point to an astonishing 3.2% growth rate, far higher than expected.
Yes, there are problems. In particular, I worry about the debt and the near total disappearance of fiscal conservatism from American politics. Where, at a time when the deficit is nearly touching a trillion dollars a year, has the Tea Party gone?
Even so, the almost millenarian sense of catastrophe — “Our towns are burning, and our fields are flooding,” says Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, another 2020 Democratic candidate — bears no relation to reality. Why, at a time of peace and plenty, do leaders of the world’s superpower feel they have to moan?
The answer has to do with human nature. Simply put, we are much more attuned to bad news than to good. Back on the savannas of Pleistocene Africa, this was an essential survival trait. Cautious hominids were likelier to pass on their genes than their optimistic kin. We carry their suspicious DNA, even though the world we inhabit is unprecedentedly safe and comfortable. Small children have to be told that there are no monsters under the bed because of their innate tendency to suspect danger. Adults see hidden hands and conspiracies for the same reason.
As we grow up, we grudgingly accept, with the rational part of our minds, that things have been getting better. We can see that by the most fundamental metrics — literacy, longevity, infant mortality — life has improved. But we can’t subdue our inner caveman. We can’t help thinking that this affluence is unnatural, and so must be doomed.
“We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who say society has reached a turning point — that we have seen our best days. But so said all who came before us and with just as much apparent reason.” So said the British poet and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay. That was in 1830, but his words have an eerie aptness to our own time.
Think of how many imminent supposed threats to humanity have come and gone in recent years such as ice ages and global warming, bird flu and swine flu, asteroid strikes and nuclear holocaust, drug-resistant superbugs. Write a book about some coming catastrophe, and the publishers will shoal around you like piranhas. Suggest things will carry on improving, even if patchily and fitfully, and no one will want to listen.
Each side has its preferred disaster scenarios. Left-wingers have convinced themselves that, quite apart from poverty, the United States is becoming more racist. It is demonstrably untrue. You can measure racism in any way you like: the decline of racial violence, the end of lynchings, the rise of multiethnic neighborhoods, poll data on how people would feel if their child married someone from another race. Whichever metric you pick, things are improving. It’s not perfect, but it continually gets better.
Right-wingers prefer to fret about illegal immigration and ethnic and linguistic ghettos. Again, these fears are as old as America, and neatly demonstrate Macaulay’s thesis about each generation believing it faces some unique and devastating menace. Every generation of Americans tends to think that past immigration has been fine and dandy, but that “this time is different.” And there is always some new factor that justifies that concern: The immigrants are no longer all English-speaking. They are no longer all Protestants. They are no longer all white. Go back a hundred years, and you will find precisely the same worries about linguistic ghettos (Polish, Yiddish, or Italian in those days rather than Spanish). Yet, somehow, things always work out.
How I long for an American politician who can use his words to make people proud, happy, and grateful, and to convey a sense of what a privilege it is to live in this age and place. I was looking last week at President Ronald Reagan’s farewell speech. I hope you won’t mind if I quote his peroration. Tell me it doesn’t make you feel better:
“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it and see it still. And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that: After 200 years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm. And she’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”
America, uniquely, is a country founded on optimism. Reagan knew it, and voters loved him for it. Is anyone prepared to talk that way today?
Daniel J. Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
