The United States of America reaches its 234th birthday this
weekend with a people divided, an economy in shambles, one of its
largest environmental messes growing roughly as rapidly as the
national debt, two hot wars simmering and one cold one showing
signs of warming.
Hot dog, anyone?
The United States has faced far greater challenges than
this. The president might be rhetorically at war with the people,
not to mention the Constitution, but Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s
bluster notwithstanding, no state has taken up arms against the
federal government. Nor are racist Eurogoons mustering at the
Rhine with hopes to goose-step their way across the Atlantic
while racist Asian imperialists forge new navies. (We have a
different kind of fanatic imperialist to worry about, but
apparently they’ve found even our lax and inept border
enforcement too challenging to handle lately.)
And yet the challenges we confront today, as World War II
veterans fade into history all around us, seem monumentally
complex and difficult. Only 65 years ago the United States could
find the resources and resolve to defeat Hitler and Hirohito
simultaneously, and do it in only four years, but now we can’t
find the courage to trim even a few percentage points from the
growth rates of our entitlement programs. Our
grandparents gave their lives to liberate Europe and crush
Imperial Japan, and we can’t sacrifice the National Endowment for
the Arts to save our own country from financial collapse.
This is a great and complex nation. This weekend our first
black president attends the funeral of our longest-serving
senator, who as a young man was a leader of his local Ku Klux
Klan chapter, and who as a middle-aged man filibustered the Civil
Rights Act. We make progress quickly here. When Robert Byrd was
elected to Congress, the South was segregated and lynchings still
happened. When he died, our president, our most trusted celebrity
(James Earl Jones) and our richest and most powerful celebrity
(Oprah) were all black. Byrd was first elected to Congress just
four years after Jackie Robinson became a Dodger. This year, 38
percent of Major League Baseball players are Hispanic, black or
Asian.
But as we sit together in sports stadiums and movie
theaters, crowds as multi-colored, if not more so, than the teams
or casts we watch (or the politicians we vote for), we are
fragmenting along political lines as our government pits groups
of us against one another.
In some ways America is more united than it ever has been.
By and large, we no longer tolerate racism, and we do tolerate
more differences in our friends, neighbors and co-workers than
ever before — except when it comes to politics. There, it’s a
nasty, bitter, divided world. Democrats demonize Republicans, and
vice versa. No one on the other side is allowed to have good
motives. Battles are winner-take-all and take-no-prisoners
affairs. Obtaining and keeping power is the goal, all else —
including national unity and future prosperity — be
damned.
The United States is a self-correcting country. An
enterprising people, we fix our own problems. We don’t gaze
across the Atlantic or Pacific and hope to be helped up. At
least, with the exception of Yorktown, we never have. One
wonders, though, whether we have exhausted ourselves trying to
fix the rest of the world’s problems. Is there any energy, any
will, to do the hard work necessary to fix our own this
time?
I think the answer is “yes.” I see the spirited defense of
American liberty that arose spontaneously to confront the current
administration’s systematic effort to seize control of the
economy, and I see hope for this country. The Tea Party movement
made it OK to oppose this president, this Congress, and their
agenda to reshape the United States in Europe’s mold. The left
dismissed it as anti-tax, but like its namesake it was organized
to oppose rapidly encroaching government power, not taxes. And it
has had a profound effect.
A year ago, Obama was popular and the left was on the
ascent. Today, nearly half of independents (45 percent) prefer
Republicans to Democrats heading into this fall’s mid-term
elections, according to Gallup. Only 35 percent prefer Democrats.
The Tea Party movement does not account for all of the country’s
shift away from Obama and his policies — Obama himself accounts
for most of it — but it had a profound effect.
The 20th century saw a big shift toward European-style
statism in the United States. Obama hoped to complete what FDR
and LBJ could not. He might yet. But I see reasons to expect he
will fail. The American people understand that the Greeks turned
what was once the greatest nation in the world into a failed
welfare state, and they don’t want to suffer the same fate. They
get that we are headed in that direction if we don’t change
course. So they are preparing to change course.
In doing so, they begin the correction that will, if divine
providence allows, enable this great nation to see another 234
birthdays. Doubtful? Maybe. But a few birthdays ago, so was the
idea that a ragtag group of militiamen could defeat the world’s
greatest military power.
