[Discussion] Post-Election Optimistic Hope-All

Closer to home, reflect upon the situation the United States found itself in the 1970s. Focusing on deliberations in Washington during that tumultuous decade, you would have found few defenders of the idea that the United States was in any way exceptional or that its future was bright. The United States had lost a tragic and geopolitically inconsequential war that had killed tens of thousands of American soldiers and maimed hundreds of thousands more while exposing deep, seemingly permanent political and socio-cultural rifts in the country. The Soviet Union appeared to be pulling ahead in the superpower struggle as the United States seemed to retreat from the world. America’s cities were in ruins (hip San Francisco was referred to as “America’s Belfast”), experiencing epidemics of drugs and crime, facing bankruptcy and depopulation, all while the nation’s culture was coarsening and the economy mired in declining growth, high unemployment, and inflation. Political leadership ranged from corrupt to incompetent and citizens had lost faith in governing institutions. America was doomed.

Or so many believed.

Not far outside of America’s Belfast, the American dream was being remade. Silicon Valley launched a technological revolution, the wines of Napa Valley bested those of France in blind taste tests, efficient container ships streamed from the port of Long Beach to around the world, and the release of Star Wars beckoned Hollywood’s renewed cultural dominance. Other California trends, from the mega-churches of Orange County to the porn industry of San Fernando Valley to the rise of gay rights in San Francisco to the invention of modern comedy in L.A. standup clubs signaled a remaking of how Americans lived, worked, and saw themselves and the world around them. Little of this emerged directly from the White House situation room or the deliberations of the House Ways and Means committee. Yet all of it mattered.

Might we be in a similar situation today? Are the things that matter deeper, tectonic forces, ranging from demographics to technology to culture, shaping the world far more than the latest Trump tweet?

We forget at our own peril, however, that what makes the United States exceptional is not a political party or leader, or even a specific ideology. America is aspirational; a dream. Most aspirations fall short, and most dreams are not fulfilled. When the dance scene ended, the singers and dancers got back into their cars, leaned on their horns, and returned to their self-contained, solipsistic worlds. Nothing is promised, even if we work as hard as possible. That aspiration, however, that dream, no matter how fleeting, is, to this historian, exceptional.