Understanding America
Gary Geipel outlines three strengths, three problems, and three reasons for hope for the future of democracy in America.
Europe hears constantly from America’s chattering class that democracy is slipping away in the United States. Bizarrely, those same people often describe their nation as so consistently sinful as to be hardly worth saving in any case. Europe occasionally hears from the current U.S. president and his cohort that a new Golden Age is dawning in the United States. Bizarrely, those same people claim that the U.S. nevertheless suddenly lacks the interest or resources to serve as a liberal-democratic partner to other nations. If you are satisfied with one of those constant narratives, then please stop reading, since this assessment rejects both choruses.
America’s strengths are obscured, we are beset by discord, and our contradictions seem unreconcilable. Yet I believe that America will find itself again, as we have always done. The USA has at least three great strengths. They are being tested now by three closely related challenges.
Beyond the Narratives of Decline
America’s greatest strength is our founding order—extending from our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution to the self-governing communities they inspired at all levels of society. Unique in human history, the USA was born in a revolution centered on universal aspirations rather than class struggle or the pursuit of power for its own sake. Despite numerous and ongoing failures to live up to our founding goals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for each person, America has never surrendered them.
To preserve those ideals, America established and still maintains one of the world’s oldest constitutional orders, divided exquisitely among executive, judicial, and, above all, legislative authority. Before dismissing admiration for this order as naïve nostalgia, consider how the populist zealots who lately have seized control of America’s two major parties would have changed the nation’s character beyond recognition if not for the separation of powers. Legislative gridlock, overreliance on temporary executive action, and long-neglected problems are the resulting prices we pay for relative personal freedom.
Our political order pleases no American completely, but it prevents any group of us in this astonishingly heterodox nation from trampling forever on the essential liberties of any others, or imposing false utopias.
Over the course of nearly 250 years, America’s failures to live up to its ideals have sometimes felt like “forever.” We tolerated the outright enslavement of millions of Americans for more than a third of our history, and denied those same Americans full and equal rights for more than two-thirds of our history. It took four years of civil war to end slavery and decades of protest to achieve at least the promise of equal rights, but a majority of Americans insisted in both cases that our basic organizing principles must prevail.
America’s second great strength is its habit of endless experimentation well beyond politics. We are never satisfied with our cultural offerings, social activism, economic development, scientific accomplishments, or technological marvels. Instead, various groups of us push constantly for what we believe are improvements. We form businesses and file patent applications at rates unmatched worldwide, while pushing the boundaries of decorum and taste in every field. Other groups of Americans often disagree with these “improvements” and, in response, compete with their own innovations or simply resist change. And so, the struggle of experimentation never stops.
American experimentation is closely linked with our openness to immigration. Endless waves of new arrivals over three centuries—self-selected for their desire to work hard and to accomplish what they could not accomplish in the lands of their birth—keep the pot of experimentation boiling. Immigrants create jobs and opportunities for their adopted fellow Americans, even as they sometimes displace the comfortable roles and social structure that existed before. In this way, immigration is almost always a source of both innovation and internal tension in America, one that can flare into conflict as it is doing now.
America’s third great strength is the durable optimism of its individual inhabitants. Like most people, we complain bitterly about our problems and status, often blaming our fellow Americans for the terrible state of affairs and lamenting the overall state of the nation and its government. But underneath this shroud of dissatisfaction, we remain quietly hopeful about our own circumstances and those of the people around us.
Of course, these three strengths are tightly related to one another. America’s optimism, in particular, rests on confidence in our habit of association, if not always in our government, and draws on the endless reservoir of experimentation. There are very few other places in the world where people can overcome poor education by starting their own schools or teaching their children at home, where people can create a non-profit organization to advocate for better mental-health care and elevate it to national influence in three years, and where previously homogenous communities can accept thousands of utterly dissimilar new neighbors with little strife
The Crisis of the Digital Age
If this portrayal of America’s strengths appears too rosy, then never fear. We have now arrived at today’s serious challenges. Three problems are at the top of the list, all of them closely related to America’s hyperactive and near-universal embrace of digital media.
First, we have succumbed to a new sort of tribalism, one that may be harder to overcome than our traditional tribal affiliations based on ethnic heritage or religion. Today, America’s most influential tribes are two populist political factions that make up for their relatively small numbers with intense online engagement, creating the impression of overwhelming power and alignment with “what people want.” The Democratic Socialist, radical-progressive, or “Woke” faction and the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) faction have dominated every national election in the US since 2016, masking the persistence of what a detailed study of American voters identified as the “Exhausted Majority,” which is uncomfortable with both extremes.
Even when their preferred candidates are not on the ballot, the two populist tribes extract near-total conformity from the actual nominees and officeholders. Consider how few prominent Democrats dare to voice support for Israel or for border control today, and how few prominent Republicans dare to voice support for NATO or reject tariffs—positions that most of them would have embraced without hesitation just a decade ago. Presented with two unpalatable options, a majority of Americans feel compelled to make “binary choices” in the voting booth while navigating the complexities of online conformity to the tribe most important in their professional and social lives.
This new American tribalism, fueled by the allure of social media, has significantly weakened our “spirit of association.” A prominent research organization surveyed more than 6,500 Americans in 2024 and found that the country’s civic life “has declined by every conceivable measure since the mid-20th century.” The study found that trust among Americans correlates strongly with face-to-face contact in their neighborhoods and with membership in churches and civic organizations. All of these activities have declined as we have shifted to online communities, which are algorithmically driven to promote slavish conformity in experiences and viewpoints. The two dominant tribes have thrived in this environment, but America’s innate collaborative spirit, experimentation, and optimism have not.
The second great challenge to America’s longstanding strengths is the rise of credulity. In short, too many of us simply believe what we are led or told to believe in our digital information feeds. Across all educational levels and demographic groups, we have too often become unable or unwilling to think for ourselves.
Consider that in just the last decade, millions of Americans have embraced firm beliefs that childhood vaccinations are dangerous, that biological sex cannot be defined or considered permanent, that one presidential campaign “colluded” with Russia to gain office, that another presidential campaign manipulated ballot collection and voting machines to gain office, that American governments have conspired for decades to conceal extraterrestrial visits, that Israel is guilty of genocide, that a Ukrainian president enriched himself on American foreign aid intended to fight Russia, etc. etc.
Human beings are notoriously susceptible to the claims of their tribes, and conspiracy theories are nothing new. Digital algorithms have taken America well beyond these tendencies, however, driving a descent into madness. In whatever way it has been determined, truth has provided a bedrock foundation for human relationships throughout history. In an information environment in which truth is optional or can be selected from a menu, long-held principles of social and political organization begin to wobble, communities of diverse people struggle to find common ground, and political decision-making becomes vastly more difficult. That is America today.
The third major threat to America’s innate strengths is the collapse or surrender of key institutions. They have been challenged throughout our history by biases, charlatans, intellectual fads, and the temptations of profit. Nevertheless, America’s public schools, universities, academic publications, newspapers, and other media avowed at least a pro forma commitment to balance, objectivity, and professionalism. In many cases, that is no longer true, and critical bulwarks against epistemological chaos and polarization are disappearing as a result.
The rise of credulity described earlier has gone hand in hand with a large-scale failure of America’s educational establishment to teach young people how to learn and to expose them to a wide range of ideas and perspectives. Rote memorization of formulas works well in some areas of mathematics and science, but it has proved disastrous in the social sciences and humanities, where indoctrination and training in activism have supplanted skeptical inquiry in many academic departments. What some observers call “viewpoint diversity” has essentially disappeared from most of American higher education, leaving behind large numbers of universities dominated by the left and a handful of small institutions considered right-wing bastions. This trend that will worsen the country’s political polarization if it continues.
American journalism is, if anything, even more segregated along political lines and dismissive of viewpoint diversity. The notion of “objectivity,” considered sacred when this writer earned a journalism degree 40 years ago, is now utterly rejected by prominent American editors and reporters as “the view from nowhere.” Instead, journalists are trained to emphasize interpretations and goals that serve correct purposes, as determined by their colleagues and political milieu. The line between activism and journalism has been blurred nearly beyond recognition.
At the same time, the digitalization of journalism compels traditional publications and news stations to maximize their prominence on social media, which, in turn, requires them to satisfy a consistent political appetite. The most successful of the “survivors,” such as Fox News and the New York Times, prioritize fan service for their aligned political tribe.
Old Strengths, New Hope
Yet there is hope, growing as always out of America’s innate strengths. American politicians, social entrepreneurs, and experimenters of all kinds abhor a vacuum, as they demonstrated most recently in the late 2000s.
The current vacuum is characterized by neglected ideas and approaches rather than neglected people. Since at least the 2012 election cycle, these are some of the ideas and approaches that have been abandoned in America’s national politics: common sense, community-building, intellectual competition, courage, dialogue, fiscal sobriety, and learning from history. While legions of contenders still court the populist fringes, at least a handful of aspiring political leaders in both major parties are beginning to fill the new vacuum. The Exhausted Majority seems likely to embrace them, and even the supposed beneficiaries of Woke and MAGA efforts may find themselves much better off as a result.
Savvy politicians are not the only people eyeing today’s American vacuum. Classical education is making a strong comeback in American primary and secondary education, with its emphasis on interrogating rather than simply imbibing the teachers’ assertions. Heterodoxy is being invited back on an increasing number of university campuses. Smash-hit cultural offerings bluntly challenge the herd instinct that sustains America’s dominant tribes.
Alongside all of this, our children are finally being compelled to put down their phones, at least during the school day. Large-scale, “spirit-of-association” efforts outside of government are aggressively seeking individual power over digital algorithms. A complete exit from the digital vortex will not happen. If anything, Artificial Intelligence will ensure that even more of our personal and professional lives take place online. However, the next generation of Americans seems more likely than their troubled predecessors to emerge as masters rather than slaves of digital platforms.
Yes, one could list at least three reasons why the hope offered here is foolish. Foolish optimism is very American, however, so I will leave the fatalism to others.
Try to understand us, Europe. Seek explanations for our situation besides the usual ones. Do not give up hope in us. Remain our friends. And of course, do not stop trying to address your own considerable challenges.