In "The Day Before Yesterday, " acclaimed journalist Michael
Elliott says, "Americans whine. They live in the most prosperous
society the world has ever seen. They have a greater level of
creature comfort than any nation has ever known before. They enjoy
great personal freedom, and their government is systematically
constrained in the ways in which it can intervene in their private
lives. And yet they are convinced that their life is miserable."
But Elliott tells us the "decline" we mourn is measured against the
false standard of the uniquely prosperous years after World War II.
The country's severe problems fall into better perspective when we
measure them against our longer history. We then see that we have
been a nation of problem solvers and can be again.
Americans have assumed for fifty years that the years after
World War II were normal, and that any deviation from that standard
is alarming. In fact, the boom period following World War II, the
Golden Age, was a historical aberration. Although it had its roots
in the American past, much of the prosperity came out of the
country's unique position in the world of 1945. Of all the nations
on the planet, only the United States emerged unscathed from the
three decades of war and revolution that had crippled all the other
great industrial powers -- Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and
Japan. As a result, in 1945 the U.S. reigned supreme.
Then, between the assassination of JFK and the end of the Cold
War in 1989, all the factors that had contributed so much to
America's self-image went into reverse. American politics went
through a period of murderous instability; the federal government
was delegitimized; great divisions grew among races, regions, and
classes; a wave of immigration transformed the country's ethnic
makeup; and the economy slowed down.
Now the major debate among politicians is how to fix America's
decline. Elliott puts that debate in perspective by showing that
we're in a natural cycle, not an absolute decline, and reminds us
that we won't find the solutions in the shiny model of the Golden
Age. Those circumstances will never be repeated. Instead, by
looking back to the whole of American history, especially to the
period before 1914, Elliott offers explanations and some hopeful
answers for our current problems. Then, as now, America was a
society of immigrants, messy, ragged at the edges, transfixed by
cultural wars and suffering serious social cleavages. America was
also home to unprecedented pioneering spirit and extraordinary
resourcefulness. America today is still characterized by the same
sense of community and entrepreneurial vision that enabled us to
overcome our problems a hundred years and more ago and become the
most powerful and prosperous nation in the world.
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