Guest Post: Why Do Americans Feel That There’s No One to Help Us? By Robin Wright -- August 7, 2019 | The New Yorker

Why Do Americans Feel That There’s No One to Help Us?

By Robin Wright -- August 7, 2019  |  The New Yorker

On Monday, Barack Obama posted a pained statement on Facebook, one of his few public comments since leaving the White House. He grieved for all who suffered in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio—and for America generally. Without naming names, he admonished leaders who “demonize those who don’t look like us, or suggest that other people, including immigrants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as sub-human, or imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people.” The same language has produced atrocities like the Holocaust and groups like isis, he wrote. “It has no place in our politics and our public life.” Within twenty-four hours, his post was shared nearly a quarter of a million times.

Yet Obama’s words may do little to assuage a deepening sense across the United States that the unique American experience is in real trouble—more than any time in at least a half century—and that there’s no one out there to help us. Reflecting on the former President’s Facebook comment, Paul Waldman, of the Washington Post, wrote, “This country is not in the mood for reconciliation and healing, and hasn’t been for some time.”

The unsettling sense that America is going wrong, even unwinding, is reflected in a new poll released two weeks ago by the Pew Research Center: seventy-five per cent of Americans now say that trust in the federal government is shrinking. The numbers reflect both frustration with the nation’s polarization and anger over Washington’s dysfunction. But something bigger is happening. Even more striking in the Pew poll: two-thirds of Americans have significantly less trust in each other, too.

More than twenty-five thousand people responded to Pew’s open-ended invitation to explain their answers. They were “full of worries about American decline, the collapse of community, heightened wariness of fellow citizens and a general sense that the anchors of communal life in past generations had been lost,” Lee Rainie, the poll’s director, said in an e-mail. Some described waking up after the 2016 election and “having the feeling they’d completely lost touch with their country.” Many said that the decimation of trust—in government and in each other—has made resolving America’s major problems much harder.

Donald Trump, and the inflammatory language that he invokes about minorities, immigrants, and others, is certainly part of the problem, but it’s also a symptom of the broader existential challenge facing a nation founded on “life, liberty and happiness for all.” “We are now, and have been in the last fifty years, plunging deeper and deeper into individualism of a very malignant sort,” Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard University, told me this week. Putnam first wrote about the increasing disconnect between Americans and family, friends, communities, and democratic institutions two decades ago in his classic book “Bowling Alone.” He’s writing a sequel that is due next year. “We are much more isolated in ways—culturally, politically, economically, and socially—than we have been in a hundred and twenty years,” he said. “The whole idea that ‘We’re all in this together’ is now out of fashion. We’d like to be connected but we’re not.”

America’s fabric has frayed partly because there are fewer and fewer experiences that bind its people, Richard Haass, the author of “A World in Disarray” and the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. Public schools no longer teach civics. Americans coming of age have not been exposed to a common national narrative about our historic political DNA—or “what makes us us,” he said. The age of broadcasting has been replaced by a world of “narrow-casting” that feeds fears, biases, and lies, with fewer gatekeepers insuring a neutral or balanced perspective.

There are fewer purple states; most are distinctly red or blue—leading to compromise being interpreted as betrayal. The elimination of the military draft following the end of the Vietnam War, nearly a half century ago, has limited the sense of duty or commitment to protecting each other. Only a tiny percentage of Americans served in Afghanistan and Iraq, two of America’s longest wars. Many who did serve were deployed again and again in repeated tours.

The idea of America as a melting pot is being replaced by the idea of Americans in separate pots. “The pattern is one of weakening social and national bonds,” Haass said. “That makes it harder to feel a shared identity or community—and to do anything collectively.”

The world doesn’t offer an alternative vision, Haass noted. The leaders of Britain, France, and Germany—America’s closest European allies—are plagued with problems that make them unpopular at home. The Western alliance, forged after the Second World War, is more deeply fractured than at any time since that conflict ended.

“We use the term ‘international community,’ but the hard truth is that there’s isn’t one today,” Haas said. “If there was, there would be a more serious response to climate or genocide.” Trump has contributed to the trend, as the United States has gone from being the “great builder to the great disruptor,” Haas added, at a time when its leadership is needed as much as at any time in the last seventy-five years.

The United States has survived other existential crises, from the Civil War, which killed six hundred thousand Americans, to the Great Depression, when many people worried that the American experience would collapse, Douglas Brinkley, the Presidential historian at Rice University, told me. Presidents worked creatively to keep the nation whole. Franklin D. Roosevelt led the country out of the Depression by making Americans feel that Uncle Sam was a friend, whether by creating jobs, electrifying rural areas, establishing Social Security, or building new dams, bridges, and public works. Harry Truman created new national institutions—the National Security Council, an Air Force, and the C.I.A. Dwight Eisenhower ordered troops to Little Rock to end white-supremacist protests over school desegregation and signed the first two voting-rights bills since Reconstruction. John F. Kennedy founded the Peace Corps and promised to put an American on the moon. Lyndon Johnson convinced Congress to pass the landmark Civil Rights Act and established Medicare. By 1964, seventy-eight per cent of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing “always” or “most of the time,’ the Washington Post reported.

During the nineteen-seventies, Vietnam and Nixon’s Watergate scandal eroded confidence in government. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected, public trust—the idea that government would do the right thing—had plummeted to twenty-six per cent. “Government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem,” Reagan said, in first his Inaugural Address. He planted an idea that took hold, especially among Republicans. “Americans came to believe the idea that government was not on their side,” Brinkley told me.

Distrust in the American political system deepened among Democrats after 2000 and 2016, when the Democratic Presidential candidates Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, respectively, won the popular vote but lost the elections. “There was a growing belief that the Electoral College was a disingenuous political system,” Brinkley said. In the end, Barack Obama was a “firewall President,” he added, who was consumed with salvaging programs and principles developed by earlier Presidents, from times when people believed government was the engine of public good.

Today, the corrosion of public faith in leadership and institutions now consumes Americans of both parties—“the feeling that cheaters win, that nothing is sacred anymore, that rich people can buy their children’s way into college, that priests molest, and when a person who wins the most votes doesn’t win an election,” Brinkley said. “It’s all causing a lot of anxiety.” And despair.

In his Facebook post, Obama wrote, “We are not helpless here.” He appealed to all Americans “to send a clarion call and behave with the values of tolerance and diversity that should be the hallmark of our democracy.” But it’s going to take far more than a clarion call to action to make the “American experience” credible again—to make us believe that our political system can unite us, that our democracy actually works, and that we can trust one another.