When did America become less than great?
This is a longer essay, but it does cover the last 50 years of American politics, so apologies in advance.
The phrase “make America great again” was first brought to American presidential politics by Ronald Reagan in his successful 1980 presidential campaign. By the end of the 1970s, America had gone through a particularly challenging period of social and economic history starting with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the Civil Rights and Sexual Revolution social movements, further assassinations, the Vietnam War, Watergate, public revelations of CIA assassinations, coups, and attempted interference around the world, and the oil crisis, and the economic hangover that was stagflation. There is a reason that Reagan’s slogan resonated with so many Americans, and the reason his election signaled a political realignment we are still living with today.
But I need to go back a little further in time for some important context. On July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter gave a speech later known as the “Malaise Speech” (although the word does not appear in the speech at all) where he attempted to diagnose why the United States was still suffering through an energy crisis that has lasted most of the decade. The full text of the speech is here, but I wanted to examine a key part of it:
The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.
The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea which founded our Nation and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else--public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We've always believed in something called progress. We've always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.
Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.
The challenges I mentioned above shook America to its core, resulting in the feeling that Carter was describing in this speech. And we haven’t really recovered. The 1960s and 70s asked us to reckon not only with our past, but an America that was less WASPy (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) than the country’s previous self-image. Black people, indigenous people, women, and queer people were all making their voices heard more loudly and openly than before, which also included trying to reckon with the darker episodes of America’s past. On the heels of these civil rights movements came Watergate, new revelations about the CIA’s clandestine operations, the failure in Vietnam and then the economic crisis. It was all too much to digest all at once. And so, America rejected this message in order to back a strong leader that made them feel better.
While Carter was saying ‘we the people ARE the government,’ and calling for us to regain our confidence as a country that could be ruled by citizens, challenging everyone to fix it, Ronald Reagan distanced us from the government, laying the blame at the feet of the impersonal amorphous bureaucrats. The citizens weren’t the problem, the government was. And while Carter believed that those should be one and the same, Reagan absolved voters of their responsibility for their choices, blaming out of control government—rhetoric Trump used in his 2016 campaign with the “drain the swamp” refrain.
Reagan’s rhetoric was all about sunshine and restoring a sense of pride in this country, but his policies were closer to those of Barry Goldwater: dismantle much of the government, increase executive power, and deregulate businesses. But Regan’s masterstrokes, helping him succeed where Goldwater failed, were: tapping into the activist conservative movement that had been quietly growing since 1964, and speaking directly to disillusioned middle class Americans who felt the country had lost its way sometime before the tumultuous 1960s.
Was anyone better off in 1980 than they had been in 1976? And if not, was it Jimmy Carter’s fault? These things are still up for debate. Regardless, it was the one thing classical Republicans, Southern Democrats, and evangelical Christians could all agree on: the government had gone too far. The rationale varied for each group in this coalition—for Republicans it was with taxes and regulations; Southern Democrats: civil rights and race relations; evangelicals: education and abortion—but Reagan could speak to each of them equally. Just as Trump pulled together roughly the same coalition: white people who felt that everyone else was benefitting from Obama except them.
We didn’t start the fire
One thing I have realized as I’ve gotten older is that the emotional components of political history are as important as the factual ones. As a country, we were tired of putting others ahead of us. Tired of thinking about all the things that would later be named in Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Although not released until after George H.W. Bush was in the White House, this song, recounting how it is always a bad time to be coming of age, perfectly encapsulates what the whole country was fed up in dealing with. Change had come too quickly and too broadly, and it was time to return to a simpler era. One with good guys and bad guys—and specifically when America was the Good Guys.
Part of this shift had been diagnosed by writer Tom Wolfe, when he dubbed the shift in Baby Boomers from social causes in the 1960s to self-fulfillment in his 1976 New York magazine essay “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” The “Me” Decade began in the 1970s, but would become the main cultural force of the 1980s. Carter also spoke of this in his “Malaise Speech:”
In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
The parallels between the progression of the Johnson, Nixon/Ford, Carter, Regan administrations and the Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump administrations are more prominent than might seem at first. The events and reaction to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks accelerated the political dynamic and polarization already in place, shifting the country’s mood to the right in search of strong executive leadership, safety, and security. By the time of Obama’s election, we seemed ready to expand civil rights and finally move beyond this nostalgic regression, but the rightward backlash to his presidency is as strong, if not stronger than it was in the 1970s. But of course, there are plenty of people out there who voted for Obama and Trump (at least once each).
It’s the economy, stupid (and safety and stability)
The only way to reconcile that this country has a whole tranche of people who voted for Obama and Trump (in one or more elections) is to look at the emotional component. Nostalgia has been a driving force in American politics for the last 50 years. But what is everyone nostalgic for? As mentioned in the previous essay in this series, it seems like many people out there long for a few things specifically: prosperity, safety, and stability. All of these things are common to the middle class white experience post-World War 2. It is easy to start connecting the dots from here.
Prosperity is the obvious one, and the one that has most threatened Trump’s second presidential administration so far. Tariffs and the war with Iran (and the resulting inflation from both) have only furthered the “K-shaped” economy, where the upper class is thriving and the rest of us are declining in economic prosperity. “In the second quarter of 2025, the top 10% of income earners accounted for almost half of all spending, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by Zandi.” This is extremely unhealthy, and may eventually reach a breaking point.
K-shaped because the blue and green lines are going up way faster than the red and blue lines
As for safety, Crime rates peaked in the 1970s-1990s, and so rather than convicted criminals like Willie Horton being trotted out in campaign ads, the right has seized on the idea that the US-Mexico border is the cause of violent crimes and must be closed in order to stop it. This connects with voters who are primarily concerned about security and safety, because it presses on the fear response of people who remember when violent crime rates were higher, and threatens a hypothetical—but avoidable—reversal to that trend.
And stability is, of course, an illusion. Stability only exists insofar as we believe it does. And while many people with authoritarian leanings might associate stability with electing a strong leader, even if that was true, Trump would be an exception. The tariffs, ICE in Minneapolis and other cities, the war in Iran, and the Epstein files are among at least several hundred other examples of Trump’s administration increasing a sense of instability in our day-to-day lives.
As Trump’s approval ratings sink lower and lower, we shall see if this is enough for someone to offer a forward-looking vision for the next phase of America that resonates emotionally. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we are at yet another crossroads. We can continue the past 50 years of looking backward because we have been afraid to look inward, or we can turn towards the light of the future. This newsletter is named for a phrase by Ralph Waldo Emerson talking about just this. Emerson wrote, "America is the country of the Future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations."
Next time we will talk about the ways pop culture has embraced nostalgia, and why we also feel like we are at a dead end. Hope to see you then.
In my ears and eyes
▶ Podcast in my ears: Screen Drafts
▶ Current reads: The Odyssey by Homer translated by Emily Wilson
▶ Album on repeat: Romanticize the Dive by Metric
▶ Find me: https://linktr.ee/silberwhatever
SOFIE UPDATE
