Cooper is the author of “How America Works … and Why it Doesn’t.”
A recent Gallup poll shows that just 33 percent of Americans are satisfied with the nation’s position in the world today. This is down from 65 percent in 2000. It's not hard to understand these sentiments. America is struggling this century in measure after measure, from numerous public policy failures to increasingly dysfunctional politics to an epidemic of mental health issues among young people.
This predicament raises two essential questions: Is America’s downturn merely another temporary dip in a long arc of non-linear, yet upward, progress? Or is it the first phase of a steep national decline?
The answer lies with the American people. Like all nations, America is, above all, the hearts and minds of its people. And the trends are moving in the wrong direction: Things are getting worse, not better. Tribalism is intensifying. Social-media platforms are getting smarter at manipulating human cognition. The political system's defects are worsening. And America’s public policy failures are deepening.
The remedies are easy to state. We must improve civic education, spend more time with people from other political tribes, regulate the use of social media, rework the political structure to foster more political voices and equal representation, double down on free speech, feverishly guard our elections and support a new Republican champion other than Donald Trump.
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Yet in practice these goals have, so far, been impossible to achieve.
Two broad and overlapping global trends will only make reversing the free fall harder as time marches on. First, technology is getting more sophisticated — at a dizzying pace. The positives are huge. The internet democratizes education. Streaming innovations like Netflix enrich entertainment. New products like self-driving cars revolutionize transportation. Highly sophisticated research dramatically improves medicine. Pioneering technologies substantially broaden the distribution of necessities like food and clothing.
But the negatives are unnerving. Online innovations like deep fakes compound the internet’s harms. Poor cybersecurity undermines the safety of personal data. Popular applications like Chinese-owned TikTok give rival governments control over Americans’ private information. Artificial intelligence jeopardizes humanity in ways neither clear nor certain. Industrial innovations like fracking plunder the environment. Battlefield inventions like drones change the face of warfare.
Second, international affairs are getting more complicated. It took America a full two centuries to achieve global hegemony — and merely two decades to lose it. As former CIA Director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote in a September 2023 Foreign Affairs essay, geopolitical threats to America are multiplying: “The United States finds itself in a uniquely treacherous position: facing aggressive adversaries with a propensity to miscalculate yet incapable of mustering the unity and strength necessary to dissuade them.”
These dynamics establish a striking truism that looms over humanity: The world’s pre-eminent democracy is in decline precisely when the challenges faced by the world are mounting and its need for rational leadership has never been more urgent.
Somewhere beneath the thickening surface of tribal bedlam and political fervor, however, is still a core national impulse to confront and overcome big challenges. The question is how strong that impulse remains.
The French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1831 and 1832. A close observer of human behavior, de Tocqueville traveled across the country taking copious notes on what he saw. His book “Democracy in America” is a classic text in political science. And he’s been revered for capturing the true essence of America like few others have, either before or since.
Perhaps de Tocqueville’s most profound insight was that the “greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” America today is putting this thesis through a searing test. And the world will find out, soon enough, whether de Tocqueville’s insight is still true.
