Despite what candidates say, America is a better place
When my little girl was born shortly after President Barack Obama’s first presidential victory, I wrote a journal entry infused with my optimism about her future. Still giddy over the election of the nation’s first black president, I wrote confidently that she would live in a world that would be better than the one that I had known.
Since then, the fates have conspired to shake my faith in that better world. Global events (the rise of Islamic jihadists, the accelerating pace of climate change) as well as national trends (the bitter backlash against Obama, the ascension of Donald Trump) have dampened my optimism.
That’s why I needed to listen, via White House video, to the commencement speech that the president delivered at Howard University earlier this month. It was inspiring on many fronts, including its thoughtful and clear-eyed reminder of the progress that the nation has made in the last few decades.
You don’t hear much of that on the campaign trail these days. Candidates from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump have a vested interest in gloom and doom, in persuading voters that this great democratic experiment has gone awry, that average voters have been betrayed either by a rapacious plutocracy or by some insidious conspiracy of incompetent government and malignant immigrants.
Not so, Obama reminded his audience.
“Given the current state of our political rhetoric and debate, let me say something that may be controversial, and that is this: America is a better place today than it was when I graduated from college,” he said.
Since 1983, when Obama received his diploma from Columbia University, the country has experienced steep drops in violent crime and teen pregnancies, he noted. Several of America’s cities, once given up as dystopias, have undergone a renaissance. Even with the lingering aftermath of the Great Recession, the percentage of Americans living in poverty has declined slightly. And despite the ugliness of the backlash against the nation’s first black president, progress continues toward full racial equality.
So what accounts for the fear that has fueled this strange campaign season? Why are so many voters persuaded that the United States is in decline, that our best days are behind us? Why has Trump prevailed with his promise to “make America great again”?
Sanders and Trump have both managed to tap into a deep-seated economic anxiety, a sense, especially among white voters, that their living standards are in free fall. They believe they won’t ever live as well as their parents did, and that their children will fare even worse.
There is just cause for at least some of those worries. Data analyses by the Pew Research Center show a middle class that really is shrinking, with fewer Americans living in the socioeconomic center, which Pew defines as an annual income between $42,000 and $126,000 a year for a family of three.
Oddly, the fear among Trump’s supporters is fueled in part by the very racial progress that Obama rightly celebrated in his speech. Blinded by bigotry, they blame their declining economic fortunes – wrongly – on policies put in place to boost the prospects of black and brown Americans. Trump panders to those wrongheaded notions.
But fear of change has never been a recurring narrative in the American story, nor has pessimism about the future been a feature of our mythology. So, Trumpism aside, I have gone back to that journal entry, written on the occasion of my daughter’s birth, to reclaim my optimism for her future.
And I can see the outlines of that better world.
Email Cynthia Tucker at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.