Kristof: Our nation is a mess, but there are reasons for hope
The grim awareness of national failures may be a necessary prelude to fixing our country.
Just 1 in 6 Americans in a poll last month was “proud” of the state of the country, and about 2 out of 3 were actually “fearful” about it. So let me introduce a new thought: “hope.”
Yes, our nation is a mess, but overlapping catastrophes have also created conditions that may finally let us extricate ourselves from the mire. The grim awareness of national failures — on the coronavirus, racism, health care and jobs — may be a necessary prelude to fixing our country.
The last time our economy was this troubled, Herbert Hoover’s failures led to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election with a mandate to revitalize the nation. The result was the New Deal, Social Security, rural electrification, government jobs programs and a 35-year burst of inclusive growth that built the modern middle class and arguably made the United States the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world.
“On balance, I am very hopeful, and I’m very optimistic,” Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, told me. “What we’re seeing today is a sort of national convulsion over the recognition that racism in America is real and it’s not a figment of the imagination of Black people in this country.”
Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, who for six decades has been battling for a more just society, told me, “I’m very optimistic. I think we have a chance of getting something done.”
Like others I spoke with, she said that one reason for hope is, paradoxically, President Donald Trump and the way he has become the avatar of failed “let them eat cake” policies and narratives. “Mr. Trump is the perfect opposition to have,” Edelman said. “He represents the implosion of the American dream, and we can’t go down his road much farther.
“If we can’t get something done now,” she added, “then shame on us.”
Betting markets like PredictIt expect Joe Biden to sweep into the presidency in January with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate. I’ve known Biden since he was a senator, and he’s no radical — but that reassuring, boring mien may make it easier to win a mandate and then use it to pivot the United States onto a new path.
So perhaps today’s national pain, fear and loss can also be a source of hope: We may be so desperate, our failures so manifest, our grief so raw, that the United States can once more, as during the Great Depression, embrace long-needed changes that would have been impossible in cheerier times.
Many scholars, in particular the late Alberto Alesina, a Harvard economist, have argued that one reason for America’s outlier status is race. Investing in safety nets and human capital became stigmatized because of a perception that African Americans would benefit. So instead of investing in children, we invested in a personal responsibility narrative holding that Americans just need to lift themselves up by their bootstraps to get ahead.
This experiment proved catastrophic for all Americans, especially the working class. Marginalized groups, including African Americans and Native Americans, suffered the worst, but the underinvestment in health and the lack of safety nets meant that American children today are 57% more likely to die by age 19 than European children are.
The polling is striking. Sixty percent of Americans, including a majority of white people, said in a CBS News poll last month that they support ideas promoted by the Black Lives Matter movement. Almost as large a majority supports a national health care plan. An astonishing 89% favor higher taxes on the rich to reduce poverty in America.
The sense of opportunity thus is emerging not solely from the wreckage of past policies but also from new attitudes, particularly among young people.
It’s not clear, of course, that these views will translate into wiser policies. Congress is often more responsive to wealthy donors than to voter opinions.
“I know we will see a better future,” President Jimmy Carter told me recently. “We have been through many painful crises, some spanning years, but we have always gotten back on our feet. Sometimes there must be a reckoning and course correction.”
“Hope right now in America is bloodied and battered, but this is the kind of hope that is successful,” said Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. “It’s hope that has lost its naïveté.”
Besieged as we are by plague and crisis, a dollop of this “calloused hope,” as Booker calls it, offers an incentive to persevere. If in the depths of the Great Depression we could claw a path out and forge a better country, “calloused hope” can guide us once more to a better place.
Nicholas D. Kristof is a New York Times columnist.