Yuval Levin places concerns about America’s future in perspective.
It is an honor to respond to Wilfred McClay’s profound reflection on the anniversary of our founding. Having done more than perhaps any living historian to contribute to the civic education of the rising generation of Americans, McClay is ideally positioned to help us learn about our past and reflect upon our future. His essay illuminates the challenges we face, and also helps us see why we should face them with confidence and hope.
But it does more than that, and maybe even more than McClay himself quite grants. His essay suggests that we should resist and reject narratives of American decline, not because we don’t face enormous problems, but because those problems are permanent and durable. We confront the same kinds of dangers prior generations of Americans have—which is both good news and bad.
“Because we Americans enjoyed a national beginning which we have come to regard as foundational, and not a mere temporal launching pad,” McClay writes, “we have the ability in times of trouble to think our way back to our origins, and take from them not only a well-deserved rebuke, but also a strong dose of inspiration and redirection.” This is surely true, but it is true not only because our foundations don’t change but also because our deepest challenges recur.
Americans in every prior generation have noted the ways in which our country has fallen short and put its future at risk, but have also ultimately risen to the demands of their time and preserved and renewed our society’s capacity for greatness. And in every generation, we have tended to understand these ways of falling short as modes of falling away from a prior peak, or a lost era of virtue. In almost every phase of our history, Americans have been impressed with their grandparents’ generation, derisive of their parents’ myopia, persuaded their own time is an age of unprecedented dissolution, and alarmed about their children’s prospects.
