American Spirit
A Century On
I’ve been listening to Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man on audiobook. It’s a new perspective on the Great Depression, and one I sympathize much more with than the version we were taught in school. It opens with a picture of America in the 1920s, and as I listened I couldn’t help but be filled with patriotic nostalgia for a time long before my birth – a time when Americans believed in America because they believed in themselves, when Calvin Coolidge’s hands-off “Americanism” reigned in politics, when even interventionists like Herbert Hoover spoke the language of American individualism, when business and industry embodied the pioneering spirit of the frontier, when the foreign ideologies sweeping Europe couldn’t find purchase among our common-sense people, when the common man was enterprising and believed that he could rise through his own efforts if only he applied himself, when optimism and opportunity seemed to characterize the very land itself.
I couldn’t help but contrast it with our own day. It certainly seems as though we’ve lost faith in ourselves. Putting one in mind of Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech.1 Recently, I read an argument that he was right and that his speech is even more right today. I have my doubts about that, but in any case, more and more people I encounter seem to believe that we are living in a bad moment, perhaps even a moment of permanent decline. We hear talk that the American Dream is dead, or that we are a waning superpower – soon to be eclipsed by powerful nations that get things done because they don’t have our internal squabbling and rampant consumerism. The loudest voices within Generation Z seem to believe they are living in a uniquely terrible moment for America and for the world.
I think this is all incredibly exaggerated (especially the “uniquely terrible” part – physically and materially, this is the easiest time to be alive in the history of the human race). I’ve never thought of myself as a buoyant personality, but I’ve never lost a minute’s sleep worrying that either America, or the world was about to collapse into barbarism and doom. In fact, the more I reflect on the spirit of pessimism in evidence today, the more I find myself strangely confident that it’s misplaced.