https://spectator.us/demise-america-greatly-exaggerated-exceptional/
One of my favorite quotes about America — mainly because it annoys so many people — comes from the historian Robert Wiebe. In his book Self-Rule, he writes:
‘Telling Americans to improve democracy by sinking comfortably into community, by losing themselves in a collective life, is calling into the wind. There has never been an American democracy without its powerful strand of individualism, and nothing suggests there will ever be.’
Cue the yelping from nationalists, socialists, Burkeans, take your pick. Yet Wiebe was less making a political argument than he was observing what was right in front of his nose. America has always been a nation of strivers, of men and women who seek to live up to their potential and who get annoyed if anyone throws a roadblock in their way. That quote, weirdly, paradoxically, sums up not just the attitude of individuals but a collective ethos. To be American is to move ever forward, in pursuit of that ‘more perfect union’. That isn’t to say we don’t value the past, but we’re more often looking at the road ahead than we are in the rearview mirror.
We saw this recently at the Republican National Convention, when Kimberly Guilfoyle screamed, ‘You are capable! You are qualified! You are powerful! And you have the ability to choose your life and determine your destiny!’ We saw a distorted version of it in the summer, when left-wing rioters decided that their narcissistic concept of progress meant much of American history had to be torn down. That’s the dark side of the striving mentality: it can too easily degenerate into cheap self-help platitudes and even Jacobin style radicalism. Sometimes we lurch ahead without considering whether it’s wise or desirable. If we invent electronic kiosks that put fast-food employees out of work, is that really progress? Are sex robots a waypoint towards a brighter tomorrow?
These are questions that Americans are going to have to confront in the years ahead. Yet there are also benefits to having the national gear shift set eternally to drive. Rather than wallowing in our problems, accepting them as indelible facts of history or insurmountable defects of the human person, we seek to overcome them.