America is Losing Its Self-Confidence

“Hold fast to dreams, for when dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly” wrote Langston Hughes in 1923.  Hughes, both of whose great-grandmothers were slaves, became a poet, novelist, political activist and leader of the Harlem Renaissance.  He knew firsthand, as Martin Luther King, Jr. would echo forty years later, the power of dreams to achieve the aspirations of African Americans and build a more just society.

Americans seem far less optimistic today.  A Pew Research 2023 poll found that more than 70 percent of Americans believe that the gap between rich and poor will grow, the nation will be more politically divided and we will be less important in the world by 2050.  Dreams of what we might achieve seem blocked by our nightmares.   We are more focused on dangers, who and what we hate, who we can’t trust and who is getting more but doesn’t deserve it.   We can’t see over our limiting horizons to a brighter future and are losing our confidence in the potential of our democracy to create one. 

Our lack of national self-confidence shows up in politics and our approach to the world. We despair of getting good candidates for president and vote not so much for as against someone.  Candidates too often prey on fears not possibilities that inspire. We see problems as intractable – immigration, violence, poverty, climate warming – rather than as challenges that will be addressed through American ingenuity, hard work and persistence.  Having failed in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan and beset with threats from Russia and China, Americans seem increasingly willing to withdraw from leadership and the promotion of democratic values in the world. 

Too many of us look backwards toward a nostalgic, imagined yesterday when the “good old days” had a lot of bad that we’ve surmounted since. We assume too many of our countrymen and women are “them,” with moral values different than “us.”  Instead of their needs calling forth our empathy and efforts, we find them unworthy or threats. “How can we love our country and not love our countrymen?” Ronald Reagan said. “And loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they’re sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory.”

We lack confidence that government can help us shape the future forgetting the President Johnson’s “Great Society” initiative produced Medicare, Medicaid and Head Start, all of which we depend on today. Most great undertakings benefit from support from government, which we more often criticize than credit. 

This is not the America that brought us to the twenty-first century. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the end of slavery, the expansion of the franchise, winning two world wars, the codification of civil rights, defeat of Soviet communism and the exploration of space were all the products of those who looked over the horizon to glimpse a desired future. They were the visions of men and women whose self-confidence in themselves and grasp of America’s core values drove them forward.  At the outset, their dreams seemed wildly improbable but as John Ruskin put it, “when love and skill work together, expect a miracle.”

Their dreams were damn hard to achieve.  “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,” President Kennedy told a Rice University audience in 1962, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” 

“Hold fast to dreams,” Hughes finished his two-stanza poem, “For when dreams go life is a barren field frozen with snow.”  Looking toward tomorrow created America. Our brash determination to face challenges head-on, with confidence and grit has been the foundation of our greatest achievements.  The ideals that shaped our past can shape our future and ignite the struggle to achieve it.

Cynics would call such thinking the work of idealists who’ve lost their grip on contemporary America. A voice from the beginning of the last century should resound today: “Yes, I am an idealist,” Woodrow Wilson said, “That’s how I know I’m an American.”

Photo Credit: Mohamed Hassan - pixabay.com