Still I keep in touch with the family that hosted me in California all those years ago, although the last time we broke bread together was in the early summer of 2013, shortly after I returned to America. Over lunch at one of those Sizzler-style restaurants they liked to eat at on Sundays after church, they told me of their fears about what they regarded as a flood of illegal immigrants coming over the border less than a 90-minute drive away, and claimed Obamacare acted as a magnet.
The president, they suspected, had not been born on American soil and was most probably a Muslim. If not, why had he bowed before that Saudi king? In the 2016 presidential election, Orange County, a fortress of Reaganism and the home of Richard Nixon’s presidential library, went Democrat for the first time since the Great Depression, partly because of an influx of non-white voters. My friends voted Trump.
Looking back over the period since I first sat on their poolside terrace drinking Mountain Dew, the temptation is to divide it into a boom-bust cycle of two divergent phases. The final 16 years of the twentieth century could be seen as a time of American dominion. The first 16 years of the twenty-first century could be looked upon as a period of rapid American decline. In 2016 Trump could be construed as a product of the dissonance between the two, a protest candidate for the millions of voters who mourned a future that never happened and a past that looked sunnier by the day. Yet the history of the United States over these past four decades, and past seven presidencies, has been linear more than cyclical, with downward trend lines in almost every aspect of national life.
Since the 1980s, America’s economy has become chronically imbalanced, with an ever-widening divide not just between the rich and poor but also between the super-rich and the rest. By 2016 the United States had the second-highest poverty rate among OECD countries. American health has deteriorated badly, despite healthcare spending accounting for 18 per cent of GDP, twice the average of industrialised nations. Even after Obamacare, more than 25 million Americans remain uninsured. Junk food has contributed to an obesity epidemic, with the average American weighing more than 6.8 kilograms than they did 20 years ago.1 Dentists talk of ‘Mountain Dew mouth’, a form of tooth decay caused by drinking excessive quantities of sugary sodas. In the world’s richest nation, life expectancy has dropped. American fertility rates have been in steep decline since the 2008 financial crash and in 2018 reached a record low. This raises questions about the country’s ability to replenish its workforce and look after its elderly, a problem Japan has been crippled by for the past 30 years.2 The gun epidemic shows no sign of abating. In 2019, 15,292 people were fatally shot, an increase on 2018. There were more mass shootings than days. America has by far the world’s highest incarceration rate, with 4.4 per cent of the global population but 22 per cent of its prisoners. Even though African-Americans account for just 13 per cent of the population, 40 per cent of those held behind bars are black. By their 23rd birthday, more than half of African-American men will have been arrested. Spending on prisons and jails grew by 141 per cent between 1986 and 2013. Over the same period, spending on higher education rose by just 6 per cent.3
Infrastructure has become a national disgrace: a D+ nation, according to a report in 2019 from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Its dams, levees, airports, air traffic control systems, hazardous waste facilities, energy grid and drinking water all received D grades. The heart sinks at the thought of boarding an American airline for a long-haul flight from a US airport, a complete reversal from the pioneering days of aviation.
Whereas in 1990 America ranked sixth in the world for education, by 2018 it had slumped to 27th. Its ranking for maths was 38th. A philistinism and anti-intellectualism pervades national life, which has devalued knowledge, learning and rationality. All too often expertise is pilloried as an elitist conceit. Basic facts are contested, whether it’s Barack Obama’s birth certificate, the science of climate change, the coronavirus or the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. American culture, while capable still of artistic transcendence, has become trashier, more celebrity-obsessed and narcissistic. For every The Sopranos and Breaking Bad there is a Tiger King and Real Housewives of Orange County.
In the post-Cold War world, America has either tended to overextend itself, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, or failed to project its might, as in Rwanda and Syria. Favouring correctives over creeds, successive presidents have entered office with a sense of what US global leadership should not look like – the essence of Obama’s ‘Don’t do stupid shit’ doctrine and Trump’s attempts to unravel all that his predecessor did – but no coherent sense of an alternative. Polarisation at home has undercut US leadership abroad by producing so many discontinuities in policy, what has been called ‘reset button’ or ‘control-alt-delete’ diplomacy. Up until Joe Biden, George Herbert Walker Bush was the last foreign-policy expert to occupy the White House.
To bastardise Dean Acheson’s biting quote about Britain losing an empire and failing to find a role, America won a Cold War but could not decide how it wanted to police the planet or project its power. No longer was there a lodestar. Nor is America so dominant militarily. According to a recent report from Sydney University’s US Studies Centre, China already has the military strength, and in particular the long-range missile capability, to overwhelm the United States in the Indo-Pacific region.4 It is hard to think of a single region of the world where America is pre-eminent. All of its strategic rivals and enemies – China, Russia, Iran and North Korea – have seen their influence grow.
Some of the mistakes of the past half-century are so glaring they will leap from the pages of history for centuries to come. The war in Iraq. The deregulation of Wall Street. The fraudulent marketing and over-prescription of OxyContin and other painkillers. The failure initially to take the coronavirus seriously enough. Others, such as the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine or the failure to adequately regulate the new economy, became ever more apparent over time.
Nor are inflection points hard to spot. The 1984 Reagan landslide, which panicked Democrats into granting so many ideological concessions to Reaganism, changed the way Americans thought about government, heightened the deregulatory impulse and shifted the country to the right. The end of the Cold War, which coincided with the shift in national leadership from the Greatest Generation to the Baby Boomers, brought to an end the era of patriotic bipartisanship. The attacks of September 11 eroded the belief in migration as a force for economic good and religious pluralism as the basis for successful multiculturalism. For millions at the bottom of society, and many in the once prosperous middle, the financial crash killed off the American Dream.
Shifts over time, more than singular events, are the key to understanding the country’s downward spiral: the widening wealth gap; the widening influence gap, compounded by the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which enabled the super-rich to flood US politics with so much unregulated money; the weakening of once trusted institutions, such as Congress and the overly politicised courts; the ideological clustering of the Big Sort, and the political distancing it has wrought; the decline of reason; the discord between a knowledge-based economy and a knowledge-free polity; the shift in values from community-oriented ideals to extreme individualism; the primacy of the internet, which has helped turn politics, and society more broadly, into such a rage-filled ruckus.
The lack of corporate responsibility in American boardrooms has been a drawback for decades, and exacerbated an array of interlocking problems: the vast disparities in pay, corporate tax avoidance, heartless outsourcing and the opioid epidemic. Likewise, lax regulation has been a recurring problem, whether it involves guns, prescription drugs, derivatives, broadcasting, clean water, the internet or the New Economy more broadly. Too often over the last 30 years, regulators have primarily seen their role as being not to regulate.
The decades-long assault on government has led to poor governance, thus intensifying the assault on government, a destructively circular problem. Small wonder that, between 1958 and 2015, those who professed to ‘basically trust the government’ fell from 73 per cent to 19 per cent.5 Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on the ‘deep state’ were a natural next step after 50 years of anti-government invective. Again, too often those in government have shown little enthusiasm for making government work. The bungled response to the coronavirus revealed once more the absence of so many national attributes that once made it the global leader: its non-ideological pragmatism; its strong and efficient government agencies; and its data-based problem-solving.
Journalists are far from blameless. Our better-story bias, especially evident in enabling the Trump phenomenon. Our Beltway myopia and neglect of the heartland, which blinded us to the reasons for his rise. Our horse-race coverage of elections, which stops us focusing on the problems, such as income inequality, that make the political weather. Our gullibility, which was never more egregious than in the lead-up to Iraq. Our conflict-driven panel discussions. Our obsession with trivialities. Our fixation with the modern-day metrics of news – ratings, hits, clicks. Our cynicism and mocking tone. Our sensationalist coverage of set-piece news events such as hearings on Capitol Hill, whether the chairs are occupied by Ollie North, Brett Kavanaugh or Robert Mueller. Our glorification of celebrities. Our frenzied tone and over-reliance on alarmist ‘BREAKING NEWS’ banners, which give the impression of a perpetual state of crisis. The fact we spend so much of our professional lives on Twitter, rather than speaking to people. Our self-absorption, fuelled by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram (and, yes, evident in the passages of this book that became a memoir more than a commentary).
The internet threatened to kill us, so we embraced its cannibalistic fury. For sure, there has been a welter of brave, brilliant and forensic reporting, but so much of the modern-day news industry has become more about entertainment than elucidation. That extends to politics: we yearn for presidents and presidential candidates with maximum journalistic entertainment value. We hate the idea of a presidency on in the background. Yet the theatrics of America’s modern presidency have played a significant role in its decline. The Oval Office needs administrators not actors. Seriousness not sensation.
America’s broken politics and its malfunctioning economy are inextricably linked and have been for decades. As income polarisation has increased over the past 50 years, so too has political polarisation. They have moved in tandem. Moreover, there is a growing body of academic evidence to suggest that, far from being coincidental, this is causal. Growing inequality has contributed to both parties vacating the centre ground of politics, and has led voters to adopt more hardline positions. Political polarisation, and the gridlock it engenders, causes further income inequality by making it harder to find common ground on policies that address these disparities in wealth, such as rises in the minimum wage or more equitable taxation.
Washington has become even more dysfunctional. Traditional checks and balances have become weaponised to such an extent that even the nuclear option of impeachment is in danger of becoming routine. Having witnessed only one president being put on trial in the past 223 years, we have seen two in the past 21. This will not necessarily hold presidents to a higher ethical standard. Rather, it might compound presidential bad behaviour, because incumbents will know they enjoy a certain degree of immunity to the threat of removal from office if they can command the loyalty of 34 of the 100 senators. 67 are needed for a guilty verdict.
With partisanship overriding everything, and with paralysis now the standard setting, America has gone 25 years without a properly functioning federal government. The last 15 years have also seen 14 of the most polarised in US political history, judged by comparing Gallup presidential approval ratings with party identification. For the past ten years the president’s average approval rating from supporters of the opposing party has not topped 13 per cent, which reveals how much Republicans hated Obama and Democrats despised Trump.6 This kind of negative partisanship is a symptom of a sick polity.
Because this is such a polycentric country, with vital centres of power spread across the country, there has always been an extent to which the USA has been Washington-proof and president-proof. This may be the chief benefit of its decentralised, federal system. Yet over the past five years so many of these power hubs have themselves been in a state of almost continual crisis.
Hollywood has been impacted by the meteor effect of the #MeToo movement and the grotesque behaviour of some of its leading men, such as Harvey Weinstein. As well as being hit by #MeToo, the major TV networks have been devastated by online streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu, and thus lost their old convening power to bring the country together. So many local and regional newspapers, which did so much to nurture a sense of community, have been wiped from the media map.
Silicon Valley has created almost as many problems as it has solved. Facebook, like eucalyptus trees in a bushfire, has turned out to be a destructive propagator of disinformation and divisiveness. Uber has shown the limitations of the gig economy, where low-paid workers no longer have any protections and struggle to make ends meet. An ongoing Wall Street scandal is that no one has ever been properly held to account for the recklessness that led to the financial crash.
The Catholic Church, one of the great pillars of American life, has been disgraced by the paedophile priest scandal. The Boy Scouts of America had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, because of a wave of sex assault lawsuits. Many of the sporting codes have been mired in controversy or scandal: American football (the epidemic of permanent brain damage), baseball (with banned steroids), US gymnastics (the sexual abuse scandal, which hit more than 368 female athletes). The music industry has been rocked by the sordidness of its most bankable star, the serial paedophile Michael Jackson. National events that once showcased the best of America have become accident-prone. There was the power outage at the 2010 Super Bowl in New Orleans that stopped play for 34 minutes, and the envelope screw-up at the Oscars in 2017.
America’s great universities remain centres of excellence and hubs of innovation, but they could hardly be described as engines of intergenerational mobility, because income inequality has created such an education gap. The Varsity Blues admissions scandal involving stars such as the Desperate Housewives actress Felicity Huffman revealed how higher education has been corrupted by the same pay-to-play mentality that bedevils politics. Besides, so many of those who make it to university end up being crippled by debt.
Virtually every sector is in a reputational ditch.
Many of America’s great cities are beset by problems. To report from certain neighbourhoods in Chicago, one of the country’s most charismatic conurbations, requires some of the same safety precautions as venturing into Kabul or Baghdad – and the city is not even the murder capital of America, a position currently held by St Louis. In New York, one only has to descend into its subway stations to witness its decrepit infrastructure, or peer skyward to see how the relaxation of zoning regulations has disfigured the cityscape with pop-up residential skyscrapers for the super-rich.
Miami faces an existential threat because of rising sea levels, as does New Orleans. Much of Houston has been constructed on flood plains, making it vulnerable to the kind of once-in-a-century weather events, such as Hurricane Harvey in 2017, that now come along every few years. Some once great US metropolises, including Detroit, Memphis, Milwaukee, Baltimore and Atlanta, an Olympic host which has long prided itself on being the capital of the New South, top the list of distressed cities, as judged by unemployment rates, educational attainment, poverty levels and housing vacancy.7 And just as no city is immune to the opioid epidemic, so no city is safe from the mass-shooting epidemic.
Admittedly, there is no shortage of good municipal governance and strong civic engagement. High-performing cities such as San Diego, Phoenix and Philadelphia have fuelled hopes of a bottom-up revival in politics, starting in the municipalities and percolating to Washington. Yet a central reason why politics functions effectively in these cities is that the Big Sort has made them more ideologically cohesive. Alas, the municipal template does not offer a remedy for the dysfunction in Washington, where the warring tribes come face to face.
The veneration of the constitution, and the lionisation of the framers, has had an immobilising effect. Dangerous though it is to speculate what the founding fathers might nowadays think – although that is the philosophical basis of originalist jurisprudence – they might be surprised that so much of their founding charter remains unaltered. After all, they themselves warned that a rigid party system and political factionalism would render it unworkable. Never did they intend the separation of powers to produce stalemate. Alas, the kind of drastic constitutional overhaul required will never transpire, because the founding fathers made the constitution so notoriously hard to change.
The constitutional equilibrium between the three branches of government, moreover, is completely out of kilter. Because of the stasis on Capitol Hill, successive presidents have been forced to rely more heavily on executive actions, which are usually subject to constitutional challenge in the Supreme Court. This has vested a disproportionate amount of power in the hands of five of the nine justices, all of whom have lifetime tenure and can now be elevated to the court on a party-line vote. America is in desperate need of a constitutional rethinking and rebalancing.
As any student of this country knows, the notion of American decline is as old as America itself. Paradoxically, this has been especially true of the post-war years, when the United States was truly in the ascendant. Sputnik, Vietnam, the domestic upheaval of the 1960s, the malaise of the 1970s, the rise of Japan in the ’80s and early ’90s, the rise of the rest. America has routinely been cast as a has-been nation, often at the very moment it was making a comeback.
There is a vital difference, however, between then and now. The national turnarounds of the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s relied on a level of political collaboration in Washington largely absent today. Faced with the post-Sputnik panic in the 1950s, patriotic bipartisanship flourished. Faced with a black revolt in the ’60s that threatened to tear the country apart, right-minded Democrats and Republicans came together to pass the landmark civil rights acts. Faced with a criminal presidency during Watergate, there was eventually a bipartisan push to force Nixon from office.
Alas, a solutions-based politics has given way to a conflict-based politics. Problem-solving has given way to point-scoring. Just about the only thing politicians in Washington have in common is that they breathe the same toxic air. Now, even catastrophic events such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the coronavirus end in disharmony.
No longer are we talking merely about decline, a strain of thought I resisted until returning to live here in 2013, when the body of evidence became too overwhelming to ignore. This has become about national disintegration. America now feels like a continent rather than a country, a geographic expression rather than a properly functioning state. Shared land occupied by warring tribes. The very term ‘United States’ sounds oxymoronic. Since the turn of the century it has become fashionable to talk of a post-American world. My fear now is of a post-America America. Its state of ceaseless conflict brings to mind the old adage that the only thing capable of defeating America is America itself. But that, I fear, is where we are.
Travelling this country, I struggle to identify where politically, philosophically or spiritually it will find common ground. Not in the guns debate. Not in the abortion debate. Not in the healthcare debate. Not at weddings, where more than a third of Republicans and almost half of Democrats say they would be unhappy if their children married a partner from the other party, compared with 5 per cent in 1960.8 Not in the singing of the national anthem at American football games. Not when the United States wins the women’s soccer World Cup, which erupted into a war of words between Trump and the team’s lesbian captain, Megan Rapinoe. Not on 4 July, now that tanks have rumbled onto the National Mall and Donald Trump has turned the Lincoln Memorial into a makeshift campaign stage. Not in the midst of a pandemic. Not in the aftermath of January 6th.
Few national events any more are politically benign or ideologically neutral. There are no longer any demilitarised zones in US politics. No longer is there even an agreed-upon truth. Instead, there are two different versions of reality, and a Tower of Babel-like inability to connect and communicate. Unifying ideas that have been elemental to the success of America have been rejected or challenged, not least the benefits of immigration.
‘America is full,’ stated Donald Trump, a short-sighted statement in a century when his country’s best hope of pre-eminence will be attracting the world’s most innovative minds. The American Dream is no longer a unifying precept. Areas where there used to be consensus are now contentious.
How can politics be deradicalised? Making the presidency boring again would be a start, although by no means a panacea. A return to the days when legislators headed to Washington with a sense of national purpose. Not insignificantly, the 2018 congressional midterm elections saw a surge in the number of veterans elected to Congress who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who tended to be more centrist and bipartisan – the 9/11 generation of lawmakers. However, young Democrats seem more energised by the radicalism of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than the pragmatism of the former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. A moderate Republican would find it impossible to win the presidential nomination of the Trumpian GOP.
Worryingly, the economic, technological and demographic trend lines all point to politics becoming more polarised and extreme. Demographic changes will turn America into a majority-minority country by mid-century and make many white people feel even more embattled, and susceptible to racial demagoguery.
Automation and artificial intelligence will continue to be serial jobs killers. Over the next 15 years some 40 per cent of US jobs could be lost to computers and machines. Visiting Pittsburgh these days, it is noticeable how many men who used to work in the steelworks sit behind the wheels of Uber cars. Worryingly for them, America’s one-time ‘Steel City’ is where Uber is road-testing its driverless cars and a centre of excellence for robotics. For the second time in their working lives, automation is coming for their jobs.
Moreover, the decimation of those Rust Belt factories is a forerunner of the decimation of offices in every American community. Over the next five years artificial intelligence is expected to transform some 500 million jobs worldwide. The blue-collar revolt we witnessed in 2016 could inexorably be followed by a white-collar rebellion.
The destructive forces that led to the presidency of Donald Trump have outlived his years in office. The earthquake that erupted in 2016 continues to shake the land beneath our feet. That is why using a ‘perfect storm’ analogy to describe his surprise victory is flawed. Storms pass. The clouds quickly part. This was a seismic event.
When I started writing this book, I began to think about what a 16-year-old making that slow descent over the mountains into Los Angeles would think of America. What thoughts would run through her mind as she passed through the arrivals hall and saw the official portrait of America’s reality-TV president, with his grin that looked as well like a grimace; a leader who denied the science of global warming, the most pressing issue for the youth of today; a man who for so many around the world was the face of the ugly American?
Would she be drawn here, as I was in the 1980s, by the conviction that no other country so stirs the imagination or offers such possibility? Maybe if she wanted to see the most thrusting nation in the world, China might be the place to go – though one would hope she would recognise the cruelty and brutal authoritarianism of the Chinese system. If she wanted to experience the highest living standards, she might find them in Australia, the lifestyle superpower of the world. As for visiting Tomorrowland, Asia’s mega-cities offer a glimpse of the future rather than their US counterparts. Would she even want to come to America at all, after the mass shootings in Sandy Hook Elementary School and Parkland?
As I was reaching the end of this book, that 16-year-old was replaced in my mind by our own daughter, Honor. So this question has become more personal and less abstract. Every word was freighted with more meaning, and asked of me the question: what should I tell our daughter about the land of her birth, the country that beguiled her father so?
First, I will assure her there is so much still to love. So much still to savour. There is American splendour in the poetry of Maya Angelou, the librettos of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the desert art of Georgia O’Keeffe, the paeans to friendship penned by Patti Smith, the fugues of Leonard Bernstein, the ballads of Ella Fitzgerald, the anthems of Elvis Presley and the siren call of George Gershwin’s hypnotic clarinet. There is American beauty in the granite thunderdomes of Yosemite, the russet hues of the Shenandoah Valley in the fall and the red rock towers of Death Valley. There is American joy in the street theatre of Manhattan, the cheap seats on Broadway and the pews of African-American churches.
I will tell her there is an American symphony to hear and see in the city of her birth, the most multicultural metropolis on the planet, a melting pot she will become immersed in every time we take the subway, a city that never sleeps – although we hope she will not take that too literally.
There are places we can visit to reflect on the goodness of this land. We can take the boat to Liberty Island, to be reminded of the words of Emma Lazarus that are imprinted at the base of Lady Liberty – ‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to be free’ – noble intentions overridden intermittently throughout history by nativist fears. We can sit at twilight on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, to dwell on the words delivered at Gettysburg by the Great Emancipator and to ponder the dream of the slain civil rights leader who sacrificed his life to make good the promise of American freedom. When she is a little older, we can go see Hamilton, to hark back to the revolutionary fervour at the country’s birth, and to marvel at a multiracial cast which showcases how American identity changes constantly over time in ways that renew and replenish.
When the time feels right, I will remind her of her good fortune: that she was born into a family with good health insurance; that her brother and sister do not have to pass through a metal detector to attend class; that her light skin grants her the presumption of innocence from most police forces in the land. But there are subjects I will avoid. Honor does not need to know that she has been born into the school mass-shooting generation, one where American schoolchildren hide in cupboards to practise ‘shelter in place’.
When should I tell my daughter America was great? I myself have not addressed the question that Trump never answered satisfactorily in 2016. The 1950s had an economy that benefited almost everyone – the exception rather than the norm in US economic history – but most African-Americans were treated still as second-class citizens. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was a crowning achievement but came in the midst of the Vietnam War, a national nadir. There was so much to admire about the first response to the attacks of September 11, but the noble instincts they aroused proved to be so fleeting. The truth is the notion of American greatness has always struggled under the weight of America’s contradictions: slavery in the land of the free; enduring poverty in what has been since the late nineteenth century the richest nation in the world. So, rather than in eras or epochs, I will encourage her to look for the greatness of America in its collective endeavours and shared historic achievements: the civil rights movement with its brave and glorious anthems about overcoming oppression; the moon shot, with its sense of astral ambition; the female fight for equal rights, another great social revolution of the ’60s; even the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, which felt patriotic rather than nationalistic. That sense of shared American enterprise, driven by the pursuit of binding goals and a sense of mutual advancement, has been sorely missing in the modern era, this age of confrontation.
Greatness will never be this country’s defining characteristic while so many of its compatriots are at loggerheads; when mistrust, dislike and hate are the drivers of politics; when the spirit of common endeavour is displaced by the toxic energy and even nihilism that now pervades so many aspects of national life; when the quest for understanding is invalidated by the denial of self-evident truths.
So my hope for my daughter’s America, unambitious though it might seem, is for a pause: a respite from the hostility that might induce a period of reflection, restoration and renewal. Los Angeles is hosting the Olympics again in 2028. Not enough time for a turnaround. But is it too much to dream at least of a uniquely American pageant that nurtures once more a sense of national commonality and inspires global awe? Not a summertime of American resurgence but a season of American unification. Alas, I fear more American carnage.