The United States needs to stop being a nation of losers

The everyone-gets-a-trophy era is over. In America today, everyone’s a loser. We see ourselves as losers, at least. That’s according to recent polls suggesting that Americans usually believe their own side is being unfairly defeated or discriminated against — regardless of which side they happen to be on.

YouGov recently asked survey respondents whether they think the country has moved to the left or the right over the past decade. The responses were split, with similar shares saying the country has become more liberal or more conservative.

If you break down responses further, a pattern emerges. Liberals are most likely to say the country has shifted right, while most conservatives perceive the country as shifting left. The one thing nearly everyone agrees on: The country is always moving in the opposite direction of their own politics, whatever those politics are.

This is hardly the first recent poll suggesting Americans perceive their own team or faction as falling behind.

In 2022, the Pew Research Center asked Americans more explicitly whether their political side has been losing more often than it has been winning. Majorities of both Democrats (66%) and Republicans (81%) declared that their own side has been losing more of the time. Similar results can be found in questions about racial prejudice in U.S. society.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, among all major racial groups, Black Americans are most likely to say Black people face at least some discrimination. Same with Asians and whites about their respective groups. (Latinos are about as likely as Blacks to see bias against them.) YouGov has found comparable patterns in perceptions of discrimination based on religious group.

Everyone sees themselves as underprivileged, put-upon, low on the totem pole. It’s a grievance culture, even for groups that once shunned this view of the world.

Republicans once appeared to believe structural disadvantage was overblown, that opportunity abounded for all and that struggling Americans merely needed to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. But if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, it seems.

In the past decade, conservatives and the Republican Party have nurtured their own culture of grievance, with politicians telling constituents that they’ve been systemically subjugated by the establishment, the swamp or maybe the deep state.

This was arguably Donald Trump’s greatest political insight: that Republicans were tired of winning. His followers are disproportionately white men who are sick of hearing about how much they’ve benefited from patriarchy and racism. They don’t want to be told they’re victors, since they, too, face real challenges. Better to reassure them that all their problems are because of a system rigged against them, and that they can simply elect someone to unrig it.

It’s a great voter mobilization tactic. But there are downsides. One is that it clouds people’s perspective about their relative advantages while robbing them of their agency. Whatever the downsides of denying structural disadvantages, the flip side is that telling people they’re hopelessly downtrodden, especially when they’re relatively well off in the grand scheme of things, might limit not just their empathy but their motivation or drive.

Telling everyone they’re really the underdogs could provide moral license to behave badly. Why not lie, cheat, steal, subvert democracy and weaponize state power against your perceived enemies, if they’re already doing the same to you?

If all sides believe this, escalation becomes inevitable. There’s an opening today for a leader with a fresher message — say, that Americans should start acting more like the winners so many already are.