Democrats must say it loudly: America is great
As we focus on the unique challenges of our time and try to make the country even better, we should be proud of how far we've come.
In 1920, the man who would become my step-dad survived a bout with childhood polio that left him with a bum leg for life. He pulled a reverse Trump—using a family doctor to cover up a real disability—to join the Army in World War II. And though he bravely limped around to practice baseball with me when I was a kid, he was never able to run.
I grew up in the 1970s, just one generation removed from pre-vaccine America. Back then, every adult remembered when parents lived in fear of their kids dying from diseases like polio, measles, tuberculosis, influenza, and tuberculosis. They’d seen in their own lives how government vaccine funding and mandates, monitoring and elimination of infectious diseases, and campaigns to reduce smoking and alcohol abuse had improved public health and longevity. The gains have been spectacular: Families in 1950 were six times more likely to lose a child before her fifth birthday than today, and the average person now lives 11 years longer.
Our current American crisis is partly one of taking things for granted. Virtually no one alive remembers the Great Depression or the Second World War (or how tariffs and isolationism helped bring them about). Most of us are now two or three generations removed from the explosion in productivity, opportunity, and wealth that made the United States the most successful country in the world.
So, understandably, we focus on the challenges of our time. And some of us see them as proof that our institutions have failed and should be smashed, forgetting how they helped solve even bigger problems that we no longer personally experience and therefore don’t worry about.
For example, everyone agrees Americans are spending too much of our income on housing today. But we’re also spending a much lower share on essentials such as food (which ate up about 20 percent of the average American’s paycheck in 1950 compared with around 7 percent now), furniture, and clothes. And though homes were cheaper in the 1950s, there weren’t nearly enough of them to buy; many families doubled up in apartments for years as they waited.
Despite costs, the homeownership rate in America is 20 percent higher than before World War II and 10 percent higher than in the “glory days” of the 1950s, aided by government programs such as the GI Bill, by federal mortgage agencies such as Fannie Mae, and by laws against housing discrimination. Homeownership is rising faster among young adults than any other age group.
Health care was also far cheaper in America decades ago. But that’s partly because there were no treatments at any price for many now-tractable ailments—not until the National Institutes of Health began investing in research in the 1950s and 1960s; no hospitals serving large parts of rural America until Congress passed the Hill-Burton Act in 1946 to spur construction; and half as many doctors per person in 1950 as today.
Meanwhile, thanks to government safety rules and regulations, we’re half as likely now to die in a car crash as during my childhood. We’re breathing 88 percent less carbon monoxide. We can swim safely in around 50 percent more of our rivers and lakes, and our parks are no longer filled with garbage.
Our lives seem less affordable but they’re also more luxurious. Even in my relatively affluent New Jersey school in the 1970s, I was one of the only kids to have traveled anywhere by plane; today, half of Americans do every year (with far fewer crashes). Our homes have gotten bigger even as our families have shrunk.
No amount of violent crime is acceptable, but it’s half of what it was 40 years ago; our cities actually were burning in the 1960s, but not today. So maybe law enforcement and city governments are doing something right. Our fight against political criminality has also made huge progress. Lobbyists in the Lyndon Johnson era routinely passed politicians cash; today, they can’t buy a lawmaker lunch; ethics rules are stringent and enforced (unless your name is Donald Trump).
As important: For all its stupidities, American foreign policy since World War II has enabled the longest period of prosperity and peace between big powers humanity has ever seen. The price we’ve paid for the security we provide is nothing compared with the hundreds of thousands of Americans lost in last century’s world wars. We’ve been rewarded with allies, trading partners, goodwill, and something else we truly take for granted: the nations Trump accuses of “taking advantage of us” have spent trillions on U.S. Treasuries, enabling America to run on debt and Americans to get more from our government than we pay for in taxes. Whatever you think about the dangers of deficits, imagine what would happen if Trump’s tariffs and attacks on allies broke this arrangement, which most Americans don’t even know about. We’d have to choose between a massive, sudden tax increase or the end of Social Security.
The parts of our government that do the most good are the ones most Americans never hear about, because when they succeed, nothing happens—no economic crashes, disease outbreaks, wars, or terrorist attacks. This is a hard thing to communicate to voters, especially in an information system designed to amplify whatever makes us most angry and afraid. It’s also a truism among Democrats that we shouldn’t say that anything is working well when people feel their lives are getting worse.
But have you noticed that this is not a truism among Republicans? The Trump White House brags every day about prices falling, about jobs created, about trillions of dollars in new foreign investment, even though most of this is totally made up. Should we give up on telling the success stories that are actually true?
After all, if it becomes conventional wisdom that nothing good has happened in America under normal presidents, that our politicians have always been useless and corrupt, that institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Reserve have only ever failed, why wouldn’t voters keep supporting the guy in charge?
Maybe there is a natural cycle at play here—in which the achievements of democracy erase over several generations the memory of the problems it cured, allowing democracy’s enemies to rise again with little resistance. If so, we’ll need to make a conscious effort to break that cycle. Our message now needs more patriotism and pride about the great country America has been and the better world we have built.
Tom Malinowski is a former member of Congress from New Jersey who was an assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.
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This is an excellent article. You are right, most people only think about the present and that, for them, is total reality.
Just because you didn’t live through a period of time does not mean that you should not know about it. During my years growing up, my mother and grandmother talked to me about the Great Depression. I was aware that money was very tight. They talked about food and making it last through the week. In her later years my mother talked about what ice cream meant to her when she was a child – that it was something that tasted so wonderful, but you had to have the nickel to buy it. And that was not always possible.
My father and uncles were part of the military that gave us a secure world after 1945.
I know the stories of past generations in my family, the reason being is that I want to know.
I have travelled in Africa and seen places that lack all the basics and the comforts that we take for granted.
I have seen the poverty. I’ve seen what it is like when people cannot get knee or hip replacement surgeries. When they cannot get cataract surgery. When they have high blood pressure and cannot get a doctor or medication. When they don’t have proper sanitation. No indoor plumbing and no toilets.
I’ve seen a city that has no traffic lights or stop signs. And the bullet holes in the buildings.
In the west, in North America, we have been so blessed. Instead of building on the blessings, we are throwing them away. And we complain nonstop about everything.
Thank you for the facts from the past & current facts (& lies)