I Believe in America

I believe in America.

 I believe it will continue to be a leader among nations to the ultimate benefit of humanity.

This is not a popular viewpoint today. The vocally patriotic, in between repeating that this is the greatest nation on earth,  among us focus on what they perceive as our short comings and failures, the loss of treasured values and beliefs and various factors that sully our good name and foretell the end of our nation as we have known and loved it.

There is widespread disagreement about what these factors are. We have heard that the nation cannot survive another four years of Bush or of Obama. Our greatness will be brought to an end by the continuation of abortion, or by its prohibition. By the allowance of same sex marriage, or by its restriction. By increased regulation of high finance, or by failure to regulate it. By aiding foreign rebels or by not aiding them. By allowing surveillance or by curtailing it. By allowing amnesty or by not allowing it.

These are all important issues. The idea that any of them, or all of them, will somehow lead to the end of our nation, or even of its leadership role in the world, is simplistic. Anybody who seriously believes this is abysmally ignorant of our history and of our system of government. There has not been a moment since April 19, 1775 when our nation has been free of problems of as great in complexity and import as those of today. At each of those moments, a majority of the population has believed that the welfare, if not the survival, of the United States depended on resolving those issues in the manner that they individually preferred.

Where are we after 238 years of living constantly on the edge of disaster wrought by our own acrimonious decisions? We are imperfectly but undeniably in a position of leadership, wealth and power that has no precedent. We have made incomplete but unquestionable progress in the inclusion of minorities, women, handicapped, and others whose ability to participate in society was unfairly restricted for many decades. Our system of education continues with unaddressed flaws while producing a disproportionate share of the world’s front ranks of innovation and intellect. The rights and freedoms in our Constitution have suffered assault and misinterpretation. Some, after extensive analysis and debate have been curtailed temporarily or permanently, or redefined in ways that not all of us like. The effort to win treatment under those rights is often far more difficult than it should be. And yet our rights have survived centuries of constant attrition.

We remain a land of opportunity. In every field of endeavor, the great achievers and successes include people who started with wealth or other advantage, but also those who started in poverty or with other challenges that would have prohibited their advancement in many societies.

In our 238 years we have done things that were visionary, generous and noble. We have done things that were short-sighted, selfish and shameful. Our record has been mixed by any measurement, and yet we are better off today than we were in what many wistfully regard as the Good Old days even though they were not.

This record of success results from a chaotic process of lurching from crisis to crisis, often ill informed, and governed by emotion and wishful thinking rather than by facts and logic.  How is it that this process has brought us success, rather than to one of the disasters we have so often skirted? I suggest these causes:

1) Our system is tolerant of chaos. Human advances are not made in an orderly fashion. They involve argument, false starts, wasted effort, mistakes and failures. Many cultures and systems insist on a single approach, or treat failure as the closing chapter of an effort. Our system allows all of these to occur repeatedly, while leaving room for continued effort until somehow from the unmarshalled confusion something good results.

2) Our system resists concentration of power. Within my life time I have heard that each of the three branches has become dominant, shifting forever the nature of our government. In each case, the dominance has been curtailed by conscious action, by events, or by counteraction built into the Constitution. The curtailment of states rights is oft-bemoaned, especially in the former Confederacy, and yet each of the states devises its own solutions to many problems, giving us fifty laboratories in which to experiment with the aforementioned chaos.

3) Our system recognizes that humanity is fundamentally motivated by the attraction of benefits for an individual family or other small social unit. “Society” and “Our country” are concepts too grandiose to motivate the everyday activities of most people.  Progress through chaos works because every individual exerts effort for the benefit of self, family and friends. Taken en masse, these efforts amount to general progress because “a rising tide floats all boats.”

4) We believe that there is some higher reason for doing all this, however much we may disagree about what that reason is. With many visible exceptions, the mass of Americans want to pursue their own interests in a way that also contributes to the good of others.

Winston Churchill brilliantly observed that “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.” If we examine democracy as practiced in the U.S. it does not earn many words of praise, because it is flawed in ways that are obvious and continuing. But it passes the ultimate test: it works, as demonstrated by our survival – stumbling, imperfect, but successful – through uncounted threats that could have destroyed us. I expect we will continue to do so, and amid the short-sighted, selfish and shameful we will find our way to some actions that are visionary, generous and noble. That is why I believe in America.