This piece originally appeared in Newsweek Japan (in Japanese ) on July 4, 2026
Growing up in the United States, I was told in elementary school that I was fortunate to live in the best country on Earth. America was the first and finest democracy in the world. All Americans were equal. All Americans were free to say what they thought, worship as they liked, and grow up to be whatever they wanted to be, including President of the United States.
The Declaration of Independence famously said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Indeed, the government of the United States was designed, as the preamble to the Constitution declared, to “establish Justice, insure [sic] domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
In these troubled times, it is natural to wonder whether the United States can recover these founding ideals. With democracy under threat, authoritarianism on the rise, politics badly polarized, partisanship morphing into hatred, and intolerance and cruelty spreading like wildfire – directed mostly against immigrants, refugees, people whose native language is something other than English, Jews, Muslims, women, members of sexual and gender minorities, or even just anyone whose skin colour is something other than white – it seems as though the United States has fallen very far from grace.
In reality, the United States was never what I was then led to believe. It is not the world’s first democracy; that was ancient Athens. Nor, for the bulk of its history, was it particularly democratic. At the outset, most U.S. states limited the franchise to white males who owned property or paid taxes – something like six percent of the population. Only in 1870, via the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, were Black people finally granted the right to vote nationally; but only Black men, and even then, in many states – including in the entire American South – Black men were discouraged or outright prohibited from voting by onerous voter qualification requirements that the overwhelming majority could not possibly meet, by threats of violence, by beatings, or by being killed. Women did not secure the right to vote nationwide until 1920, via the Nineteenth Amendment, and even then in many places women faced practical obstacles to voting deliberately thrown up by those who believed that a woman’s place was in the home, not in the public square. And Native Americans were not legally recognized as citizens and granted the right to vote nationally until 1924.
Nor have Americans ever been equal in other respects. There have always been a multitude of deeper, more insidious dimensions of structural privilege or disadvantage that made it easy for some Americans, and nearly impossible for others, to benefit from whatever formal equality they might otherwise have enjoyed at any given time. These included race and sex, of course, but also wealth and social status.
While polarization, partisanship, intolerance, and cruelty abound in the United States today, they have all been evident also at various other points in American history. In the 1760s, independence-minded revolutionaries would routinely tar and feather British loyalists, or terrorize them in some other way, until they fled to Canada. In the early 1800s, nativists routinely attacked and killed Catholics and immigrants in eastern-seaboard cities. Thousands of Native Americans died on the Trail of Tears, a massive, forced relocation from the American Southeast to territories west of the Mississippi River, and hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of others were killed outright, died from disease, were forced onto reservations, or experienced cultural genocide as white settlers moved westward. Pro-slavery and abolitionist forces did battle with kidnappings, assassinations, and terrorist attacks in the lead-up to the Civil War, which, when the guns finally fell silent, left somewhere between 600,000 and 750,000 Americans dead. According to the NAACP, 4,743 Black people were lynched between 1882 and 1968. Membership in the Ku Klux Klan – nothing if not a hate club – surged to perhaps six or eight million in the 1920s. 120,000 people of Japanese descent were interned in camps during the Second World War, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. And so forth and so on.
Finally, what about the claim that anyone could grow up to be President of the United States? No woman has ever been president. All but one (Barack Obama) has been white.
What is there to recover?
All countries mythologize their past, embellishing some things, inventing or conveniently overlooking others, and generally cultivating a narrative of self-congratulation. My classroom experience in upstate New York was in no way unusual. But nostalgia for a non-existent past can be a dangerous thing, as it can shape unrealistic hopes and expectations. If there is a prior reality worth striving to recover in the United States, it must by definition have been real. What in America’s past is lacking in America today that is worthy of lament?
The answer to this question is not America’s founding ideals. Those have always been present, at least as aspirations and inspirations. What are missing today are certain norms and dispositions that at least opened up space for progress toward realizing these founding ideals. These are what are sorely missing in Donald Trump’s America, and these are what Americans can hope to recover. Three stand out as particularly important:
1. Politeness and decorum
Not all segments of any society have cared about – or consistently exhibited – politeness and decorum. But for much of American history, if not all, the norm was for public figures to disagree with their opponents without disrespecting, disdaining, or demonizing them. This kept open the opportunity for genuine communication and public deliberation. Students of American politics will recall that the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, for example, contained fireworks on policy, but nothing more than gentle, often affable personal barbs. On the whole, they were very substantive exchanges. Bill Clinton, in his first televised debate with Republican presidential candidate Senator Bob Dole in 1996, opened with, “I want to begin by saying again how much I respect Senator Dole and his record of public service and how hard I will try to make this campaign and this debate one of ideas, not insults.” Democratic senator Hillary Clinton once said of Republican senator John McCain, “He is a patriot, and I am honored that he is also my friend.” In contrast, in the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump publicly called his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, “horrible,” a “s— vice president,” and “not a smart person” with “a low IQ.”
2. Respect for expertise
America has traditionally always valued knowledge. It has lionized its scientists, inventors, and engineers. It has listened to, and respected, its journalists and public intellectuals. For much of its history, it has given its leaders the benefit of the doubt on contentious matters of public policy, deferring to their collective wisdom and judgment. Experts are not always right, of course, and from time to time following their advice will lead to disaster. But even experts who are wrong have knowledge that the rest of us do not have, and when they are wrong one can be sure that other experts will speak up and say so. In this way expert debate can help keep the ship of state upright as it strives for progress toward a more perfect union.
Throughout the history of American politics, experts generally enjoyed high levels of public respect. This began to change during the Vietnam War, when so-called experts led the United States into quagmire and disaster by mistaking a postwar decolonial struggle for a Cold War superpower confrontation. The Tet Offensive of 1968 showed the American people that their leaders had been systematically lying to them about how well the war was going. Walter Cronkite – America’s most trusted journalist – played a crucial role in turning the tide of American opinion on the war in a famous report from Vietnam that February: “To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” In response, President Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” Such was the general respect for Cronkhite’s expertise.
In America today, everybody and nobody is an “expert.” YouTubers and Instagram influencers post nonsense videos about things they do not understand, generating thousands of likes and shares. Unqualified sycophants and hacks sit atop vital federal departments and agencies. The government tells researchers what they are and are not allowed to research, and tells teachers what they are and are not allowed to teach. “Stop trusting experts,” urged noted anti-vax conspiracy theorist (and Health and Human Services Secretary) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Both the government and a shockingly large share of the American public have done so. Who knows how many Americans will die prematurely as a result? Ignorance and quackery are antithetical to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
3. Openness to the world
American history has famously featured a long-running battle between isolationists and internationalists – between those who have felt that the problems of other countries and continents are not America’s problems, and those who have felt that, particularly in a tightly-coupled interdependent world, what happens abroad is bound to affect what happens at home. Isolationists tended to hold the upper hand in earlier periods of American history. But, since World War II, internationalists have tended to have the better of the argument. The postwar Liberal International Order that the United States helped build and maintain provided relative stability for decades, lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty, and enabled astonishing improvements in quality of life.
In this effort, the United States has been both engine and beneficiary. “America’s Got Talent,” one might say, and that talent – in universities, in boardrooms, in civil society, and so forth – has over time increasingly been foreign-born. Throughout American history, foreigners have been a major driver of the country’s wealth and technical progress.
Today, driven by a populist, white-supremacist, anti-immigrant backlash against genuine egalitarianism, America is pulling the rug out from underneath the bases of its own success. By closing its doors, deporting many of its most productive workers, alienating its friends and allies, failing to stand up to its authoritarian adversaries, and squandering its power both hard and soft, the United States is sowing the seeds of its own demise as a great power. Other countries are left to proclaim and uphold the principles that America once championed – countries such as Japan, Canada, Australia, various members of the European Union, and Taiwan – but they lack America’s wealth and power. It remains to be seen whether they can maintain enough of the Liberal International Order to prevent the world from descending into a new dark age of domination and oppression.
It is unclear exactly what has caused the erosion of these three norms and dispositions, but I suspect a key driver is a decrease in “ontological security,” or a stable sense of self in a stable social milieu. Economic precarity, demographic change, and a decline in the social status of white working-class males have fed grievance, nativism, racism, misogyny, scapegoating, demonization, and a willingness to insult, mock, and disparage. As Sigmund Freud would put it: America’s superego is broken; its id is on full display.
Obstacles to overcome
What stands in the way of America recovering the best of what it used to be? Books could be written on this subject, but in closing I will stress the importance of three things.
First, America must find a way to better navigate its public information environment. The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan famously used to say. In the era before the dawn of the Internet, public deliberation relied heavily on a small number of traditional media and relatively few sources. But at least those sources had the virtue of quality control and an ethos of professionalism. People got their information and analysis from newspapers, network broadcasts, and publishers that were respected because they both exhibited and cultivated – wait for it! – politeness and decorum, respect for expertise, and openness to the world.
Today’s information environment is both siloed and cacophonous, largely devoid of quality control, and little concerned (if at all) with promoting collective problem-solving through genuine deliberation. Generative AI will soon make everything worse by cultivating intellectual laziness, eroding critical thinking skills, and regurgitating or hallucinating bad information.
Genies, once having escaped from bottles, are notoriously hard to put back in. But what is needed is a concerted effort to teach children how to distinguish good information from bad, what and whom to trust, and the importance of engaging with voices and viewpoints that might initially seem foreign or uncomfortable. The current information environment is not going to become any less cacophonous, but it can become less siloed, and the people navigating it can cultivate the circumspection and critical thinking skills that will make the ease of accessing information an asset for, rather than an obstacle to, deliberative democracy.
Second, America needs to have a wide-ranging conversation about buttressing what philosopher John Rawls called the social bases of self-respect. These are the public conditions that enable people to feel that society values and supports their capacity to formulate and pursue a meaningful plan of life, and this in turn requires making sure that everyone feels that they belong. Stronger protections for political and civil liberties, fair opportunities to participate in social and political projects, and institutions people can believe in and support are all important for giving them a stake in fixing what is wrong with the country. For the most part, the ideational resources such a project requires are already in place. They are the fundamental principles that my elementary school teachers trumpeted prematurely, and the norms that enable civil discourse and dialogue.
Third – and finally for now – America must confront its foundational myths and narratives. Democracy, liberty, freedom, and justice for all are fine aspirations not served by pretending that they have ever been fully achieved but by acknowledging that they are works in progress. The surest way to derail such a project, however, is to dwell on grievance and blame. No American alive today is personally responsible for the country’s historical failures. But all stand to gain from a collective effort to overcome them.