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The Depressed Superpower

By Gabor Steingart in Washington

As frustration takes hold in the land of optimism, Americans are beginning to resemble Germans. They are collectively depressed over the Iraq War, the weak dollar and the aging of the baby boomers. Presidential candidates are left to preach change to an electorate that is afraid of it.

All it takes to find out why America is in such a bad mood is a look at the local section of any American newspaper, at the photos of the smiling faces of soldiers killed in Iraq.

All it takes to discover why Americans are beginning to doubt their own greatness is to accept an invitation to a dinner hosted by Adrian Fenty, the mayor of Washington, DC. His vision, says Fenty, is for students in the District of Columbia to receive their books at the beginning of the school year, not in the middle. When asked whether he has other visions, the mayor nods enthusiastically. His goal, he says, is to improve security in the city's schools. Fenty wants to make sure students in the United States capital can once again leave the classroom without facing the threat of violence.

All it takes to understand why the United States, a once-proud economic power, seems so unsure about itself these days is a walk through a supermarket with author Sara Bongiorni. In her book "A Year without 'Made in China': One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy," Bongiorni describes how even those who call themselves smart shoppers have mixed feelings when they purchase low-priced, foreign-made products. "When I see the label 'Made in China,' part of me says: good for China. But another part feels a rush of sentimentality because I've lost something without exactly knowing what it is."

Taking a trip down America's memory lane -- to Gary, Indiana, for instance -- is a good way to understand why Americans today are so anxious about the future. In the days when Gary was the home of the world's biggest steel company, the running joke was that US Steel was so hard up for workers that it would even hire dead people.

The company attracted workers from around the world, including the family of future pop star Michael Jackson. Gary's steelworkers pumped prosperity into America, and the country still retains a sizeable chunk of the past that once thrived in Gary and other places like it.

Optimism Is Becoming an Endangered Species

But Gary is an ailing city today. US Steel has moved its headquarters elsewhere and has severely cut back its Gary operations. Nowadays, the city isn't doing any better than its most famous son. Both have seen better days, but the difference is that Gary doesn't even have the money for a facelift. Once a city of 200,000, half of its population has since left for greener pastures.

Gary is not America by any means. And yet many Americans feel that their country could soon be following in Gary's footsteps. Optimism, once considered practically a part of the American genetic makeup, has suffered considerably in recent years.

Demographers paint a picture of a somewhat melancholic, acutely dissatisfied and to some extent bitter nation. And while many would lay the blame at the feet of the country's unpopular president, George W. Bush, American frustration goes far beyond the current occupant of the White House.

Sixty percent of Americans believe that the next generation will be worse off than their own. A majority of Americans have no confidence in the government's ability to solve the nation's problems. Sixty-two percent are convinced that the administration is a failure at everything it tries to do. The logo on a popular T-shirt reads: "I Love My Country. It's the Government I'm Afraid Of!"

Sixty-eight percent of Americans see their country going down the wrong path in every respect. According to demographers, America today is even more overcome by pessimism than it was in 1974, a disastrous year in American politics. It was the year the US military withdrew from Vietnam; and back in Washington, the Watergate scandal led to the impeachment of then-President Richard Nixon. The New York Times even has a name for it: the "happiness gap."

There is in fact little today that an American can be proud of, unless he happens to be one of the lucky few to have collected an annual bonus or won the Nobel Peace Prize. The only thing that has doubled in the seven years of the Bush administration is the country's military budget. By comparison, the average US family income has stagnated in the last decade or so.

A look at the US economy doesn't exactly offer grounds for optimism. The US's share of global exports has been cut in half since 1960. The balance of trade deficit has skyrocketed from about $80 billion in 1992 to a forecast $700 billion in 2007. The dollar has lost 24 percent of its value against the euro.

The Bush administration's answer to skeptics is that America is still growing at a faster rate than Europe. Consumer spending drives the economy, say politicians in Washington. But since when has consumer spending made a nation wealthy?

'Happy Talk' Is Spoiling Americans' Moods

It is this attempt to normalize the abnormal, to insist that the exception is in fact the rule, that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, in a recent speech to businesspeople in Chicago, called America's constant "happy talk," and is in fact spoiling the mood for Americans.

Even Alan Greenspan, not quite as reticent now that he no longer heads the US Federal Reserve Bank, has taken to qualifying his earlier optimism. Talking to students at a Washington university recently, Greenspan cautioned them against the pitfalls of making "rosy assumptions." His comments were met with a sea of dead-serious faces.

Americans are capable of handling anything -- just not the notion that something cannot be improved. When their pioneering ancestors tamed and developed the nation, their motto was: "If you can dream it, you can do it." But nowadays more and more Americans face nights as dreamless as their days are dreary. America's new reality is simple: Hope dies first.

Many believed that the early start to the presidential election campaign would lift the country's spirits. The sooner the Bush era comes to an end, they thought, the better. Elections in America are always a time to dream.

The American Dream, the great hope of a better future, is the most important promise a candidate must deliver before he or she can move into the White House. According to journalist and author William Safire, if government institutions are the skeleton of the body politic, then the American Dream is its soul.

American politicians wear their dreams on their sleeves. Ronald Reagan once said that, for him, the American Dream means "that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him." John F. Kennedy dreamed of a "world without war." Richard Nixon was dreaming of himself when he said, accepting his party's nomination for president at the Republican National Convention in 1960: "I believe in the American Dream because I have seen it come true in my own life."

Dreaming of the Past

The dreams of the current political season are woven from the cloth of nostalgia. Candidates across the political spectrum constantly use words like restoring, rethinking and reshaping, and spout concepts like regaining the US's position as a global power, rediscovering its identity and reestablishing its national resolve.

The Republicans recently held a conference at Washington's Mayflower Hotel devoted to the American Dream, clearly with the intention of boosting their collective confidence as they face the future. An image of a sky filled with stars was projected on the ceiling of the darkened ballroom. Some men in the audience were even wearing white cowboy hats with their business suits.

Several presidential candidates spoke at the event, but a speaker who chose to celebrate, once again, the West's victory over communism drew the loudest applause. After projecting a slide of an East German-made Trabant car on the wall, he said that it showed what happens when a communist planned economy wins the contest. The audience was ecstatic. Who would have thought that the Cold War could still warm the cockles of Republican hearts today?

Visions of the future, on the other hand, are not in demand with voters who -- again resembling Germans in this respect -- aren't quite sure what exactly they want.

When it comes to the future, the issue of global warming raises the most puzzling questions. According to an NBC News survey, today twice as many Americans as last year say that the climate issue is the "world's biggest environmental problem." And yet the number of Americans who favor stricter government control over gasoline consumption has been declining.

Attitudes toward healthcare policy are equally paradoxical. A majority of Americans says "yes" to Hillary Clinton's call for universal healthcare, and yet a majority says "no" when it comes time to pay for the additional costs that such a system would impose.