Why aren’t we happy?

Two-thirds of Americans feel the country is going in the wrong direction. The financial markets are in upheaval, sending waves of uncertainty through the economy and almost certainly through your home. Inflation is raging. Consumer spending is falling. Three-quarters of Americans say that they are suffering from “COVID news fatigue,” impatience with the ceaseless worry about the virus. The two parties are fighting more than ever. Sensible people are raising the specter of “civil war.” Sober people are worrying about real war with Russia and maybe someday with China.

And yet GDP is rising by an annual rate of 6.7 percent, an astonishing figure during a pandemic. Unemployment remains below 4 percent, by traditional measures signaling “full employment.” The country is basically at peace. Omicron spread through the country like a cyclone but seems to be easing up. Sensible, sober people are employing the phrase “endemic” instead of “pandemic.”

With all that good news, the pollster John Zogby, citing what he called “some of the most dismal feelings and evaluations that we’ve ever seen,” produced a half-hour podcast the other day titled Why Aren’t We Happy?

In 1968, the year of two assassinations, Vietnam protests, disruptions at the Democratic National Convention and the calming words of Genesis from Apollo 8 in Christmastime orbit of the Moon, the political journalist Theodore H. White published his only play. In “Caesar at the Rubicon,” Mr. White, known for his landmark “Making of the President” series, spoke of “the terrible conflict between the idea of liberty and the idea of order,” and he said, presciently, “Rarely does any civilization harness the two; but when that happens, the results can be spectacular and magnificent, as they were in Republican Rome, in Ancient Athens, in England at its apogee, in the United States for how long we do not know.”

Note the last seven words, written 54 years ago: for how long we do not know.

Those words haunt us. Republicans want ballot security because they believe the 2020 election was compromised. Democrats want ballot security because they believe Republicans will compromise the 2024 election. Everyone wants order but is willing to resort to disorder — the phrase “go to the streets” is heard as often today from Democrats as it is from Republicans — if things don’t go their way. The sportswriter Grantland Rice (“It’s not that you won or lost but how you played the game”) has been supplanted by UCLA football coach Henry “Red” Sanders (“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”).

Later in the 20th century the Sanders quote would be appropriated by Vince Lombardi. Now that notion has poisoned our politics in the 21st century, prompting us to recall the (possibly apocryphal) 18th century warning of Benjamin Franklin, who, asked what kind of political system the Constitutional Convention produced, replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Meanwhile, there are faint signs — “green shoots,” as economists say — the country is recovering from its ennui.

There is reason to believe that both parties will join to pass legislation to clarify how Electoral College votes are reported and counted. That would be a good thing.

There is reason to believe that the public is impatient with Capitol

Hill partisanship. Threequarters of Americans say they disapprove of Congress, which paradoxically is a good thing; politicians hate nothing more than being hated, and there is reasonable hope that public contempt might change their public comportment.

There is reason to believe that the country’s long-term economic woes are easing. Look at Ohio, often a bellwether. Intel has announced it will build a $20 billion chip plant near Columbus. Farther south, in Cincinnati, an Innovation District is reshaping the economy of a city once dependent upon Procter & Gamble. “The Intel investment is one of many signs that, after years of unsung effort, the revival of America’s heartland is fully underway,” Richard Florida, the University of Toronto economic futurist, and David J. Adams, the lead architect of the Cincinnati initiative, wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

They added that upstate New York, Western Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota are showing encouraging signs of joining the trend that prompted Ohio’s Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown to tweet: “Today we’re finally burying the term ‘Rust Belt.’ ”

There is reason, amid a long overdue racial reckoning and a broader, more inclusive view of our own history, that several aspects of American life are again worth noting and celebrating.

So much of the country’s modern identity — so many of the elements of modern American pride — can be traced to World War II, which created American economic, political, military and cultural supremacy. The recent death of Senator Bob Dole, an injured veteran of the conflict, provided a vivid reminder.

Consider the remarks of a

Japanese naval officer captured by American forces in the Philippines. Kiyofumi Kojima looked at the men who took him as prisoner and said, “Blond, silver, black, brown, red hair. Blue, green, brown, black eyes. White, black, skin colors of every variety. I realized then that we’d fought against all the peoples of the world. At the same time, I thought, what a funny country America is, all those different kinds of people fighting in the same uniform.”

National unity cannot be decreed. No matter how many times Mr. Biden stands before a microphone and plaintively pleads for unity — no matter how many times he beseeches, “We’re Americans!” — the country will not rally together. National unity comes from the heart, not from the rostrum.

Abraham Lincoln tried in 1861, when he said, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” Some 39 days later, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter.

John F. Kennedy tried a century later, in 1961, when he bid Americans to “ask what you can do for your country.” The nation blithely went on with its business, watching “Babes in Toyland,” listening to Patsy Cline “fall to pieces,” doing the “Twist” with Chubby Checker and for the most part turning a blind eye to the racism that prompted the Freedom Rides of that year.

Maybe the antidote is in the words of a Black poet who said that America never was America to him but nonetheless pleaded, “Let it be the dream it used to be.” Let it.