Failure to address social, cultural ills leaves US vulnerable to decline
A large majority of Americans — dissatisfied and disillusioned — believe the country is on the wrong track. Major institutions are mistrusted. The Congress is dysfunctional. The Supreme Court has become unapologetically politicized. Corporate news media — both national and local — and social media alike have become rigidly politically and culturally aligned.
The COVID pandemic continues to decline or reemerge — but it’s not over. Inflation, now at 8.5%, continues to rise. Unless the Federal Reserve is swift and decisive, it threatens to become entrenched and self-perpetuating.
Other major policy decisions confront us and need to be dealt with. Russia’s crimes and the destruction in Ukraine are an immediate challenge to U.S. resolve and leadership. Climate change worsens. The national debt is $30 trillion and rising. Global supply chains fail. Crime and gun violence are escalating. Drug addiction and the overdose crisis continue to rise and continue to ruin lives. The inadequacies and inefficiencies in the American health care system have become painfully evident. Our immigration system is broken and neither political party has deigned to fix it. The divide between rich and poor widens, diminishing both the middle class and opportunities for upward mobility.
Those Americans who aspire to quality higher education often have to take on multiple loans — often multiple jobs — and defer many of the achievements and milestones that mark adulthood. Those include marriage, having children and buying a home. Student debt nationally now totals $1.6 trillion. It used to be easier to make it in America.
We seem to have abandoned the “Can-Do” spirit that in the past enabled America to tackle and solve its most daunting challenges. Now we are divided and stymied. The unhealthy signs of despair and fatalism now seem endemic.
In the past, the engine of US prosperity and dynamism has been the vitality of its high population growth. This was driven by the nation’s high birthrate and the healthy flow of immigrant arrivals. In late December 2021, the Census Bureau reported that our population growth was sputtering out — it registered a mere 0.1%. In 2021, life expectancy in America continued to drop.
Declining population growth, for which the pandemic is only partially responsible, is still a critical force socially and economically. Almost 2,300 counties, more than three-quarters of all US counties, report more deaths than births last year. Since the end of the Great Recession low fertility rates have persisted and we continue to shift toward an increasingly older population.
The severity of population downturn is driven by declines in births and in immigration. The decrease long predates COVID. The US population has fallen precipitously since 2007, when births decreased by 1.9 million. The total fertility rate then was 2.1%, which is simply the replacement rate. Now it is at 1.64%.
In 2016, immigration fell very sharply. In the 2010s, the foreign-born population in the US saw its smallest increase in 40 years.
We’re now an older population without the dynamism of new immigrants — with their new ideas, innovations, commitment and enthusiasm — confronting an ever changing, ever challenging American landscape.
Some of the demographic stagnation traces, in part, to policy choices made in Washington. Our long-term prospects in general are threatened by divisive politics and the inaction of our elected representatives. Likewise, polarization of the American electorate has a suffocating effect on our democracy.
Our culture wars have turned deadly and have embraced methods antithetical to democracy. Texas and Florida are attempting to cancel self-government. By inaction, the Congress has ceded much of its responsibility to the Supreme Court.
These cultural and social ills portend a frightening reordering of the nation we once knew. The continued failure to confront these problems and predicaments will drive future anger and disruption — far greater than what we have seen so far.
From the general population to the highest ranks in government, corporate and cultural leadership — we’re older, we’re less innovative, we’re not solving America’s problems.