The word “fear” is in the news a lot these days.
Fear that Ebola will spread. Fear that ISIS (and other terror groups) will establish a Middle East caliphate or, worse yet, strike the West. Fear that the soaring stock market is due for another meltdown. Fear that the planet is warming or that we’ll ruin the economy trying to prevent climate change. Fear that our children will not have better lives than we have had.
The collective effect of these and other fears is debilitating. The powerful can-do optimism that has helped drive this country to almost incomprehensible successes is sapped by the anxiety of suspecting that America can’t quite get it done anymore.
We talk a good game about achievement, but the results don’t reflect the rhetoric. Ron Fournier, writing in the National Journal, put it this way:
“Steadily, over the past four decades, the nation has lost faith in virtually every American institution: banks, schools, colleges, charities, unions, police departments, organized religion, big businesses, small businesses and, of course, politics and government.”
This decline of faith, Fournier says, has created a crisis of leadership and trust.
This is particularly true among the political class, where the failures have become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Politicians are predictably wary of the truth being used against them by their opponents, so they overpromise on broad, generic issues—jobs, the economy, health care, social services.
The electorate either tunes out or falls for the rhetoric. Disappointment accompanies either course. Why do people seem so upset? Anger, revenge and hatred are next to disappointment on the scale of emotions. We’re trending more toward fear and away from trust, optimism and hope.
Barack Obama was elected on the promise of hope and change, but the results are marginal at best. Yes, electing a black man to the nation’s highest office was a seminal moment and one worthy of a nation anxious to excoriate the darkest chapter of its history, but now in his second term Obama seems incapable of making a difference.
The onset of disappointment and fear are not singularly attributable to Obama; he just happens to be the latest and most visible example of our mediocrity in high places.
“It wasn’t Obama who mislead the public about Saddam Hussein, or the Vietnam War or Watergate,” Fournier writes. “The trust deficit runs deeper than one president—or even the presidency. While vast economic, social and technological changes buffet the lives of most Americans, those institutions that are supposed to shield people are falling apart.”
As these institutions unravel, America turns even more toward government for solutions, producing an unhealthy paradox, according to Peter Schuck, author of “Why Governments Fail So Often.”
“From healthcare to workplace conduct, the federal government is taking on ever more responsibility for managing our lives. At the same time, Americans have never been more disaffected with Washington, seeing it as an intrusive, incompetent, wasteful giant.”
We simultaneously want government to fix things and don’t believe it can. That’s a crippling paradigm. No wonder a poll earlier this year by ORC International for CNNMoney found that 59 percent of the U.S. now believes the American Dream is out of reach.