Last weekend, the Olympics came to a close and Team USA stood regnant over the rest of the world.
It was a record-breaking year for American athletes, who scooped up 121 medals, including 46 golds, more than any other nation. The United States dominated every category of sport, a winning streak that hasn’t been pulled off at a Summer Games in 40 years. Of particular note were the women, who won well over half the American golds, with Simone Biles, a gymnast who apparently moonlights as Elastigirl, first among them.
That gets you thinking: throughout much of Central Africa, women aren’t just unlikely to be Olympians; they’re barred from holding government positions, brutalized by unspeakable war crimes, oppressed by an ever-rotating cast of male-dominated militias. The connection made by Christopher Hitchens between empowering women and ameliorating poverty still holds — and sometimes nets you a couple dozen gold medals to boot.
In America today, women are liberated, while combined individual wealth is the highest in the world — China, in second place, barely has 35 percent of what we do. Of course, there are objections to be made over the inequality in our economy. But the fact remains that we are a powerful, prosperous, relatively free country, the largest economy in the world, separated by vast oceans from much of the globe’s strife, with better opportunities for advancement than anywhere else.
So why are so many Americans bummed out?
Judging from the public mood, you would think it was the late 1970s all over again, with runaway stagflation and snaking gas lines. According to Gallup, only 17 percent of the public is satisfied with the direction of the country, up only 10 percent since the recession of 2008 and 5 percent since Jimmy Carter donned a cardigan.
Ronald Reagan’s politics of optimism has fallen by the wayside: today it’s all about screaming until you’re hoarse, preferably at Washington and Wall Street, in which public trust has (rightly) bottomed out. So deep is the dissatisfaction that many voters have given up on the major political parties and gone spelunking elsewhere on the political spectrum.
But we’re not the Baltics; we’re number one, and not just our Olympians. The ideological challenge to American capitalism posed by China is fading away, as the Shanghai Stock Exchange tremors ominously. The ludicrous Vladimir Putin flexes his spindly muscles in Syria, even as his economy continues to contract back home.
So why the massive dissatisfaction?
A few reasons, I think. The first is that we still haven’t fully recovered from the havoc that was wrought by the recession. Comparatively low unemployment numbers mask massive workforce dropouts, and, while wage stagnation is partially a myth, pay still hasn’t risen as consistently as it might have. So while times are good, for many they’re not nearly as good as before, and for some they haven’t improved at all.
The second reason is that perception is reality. Switch on the news these days, especially the fatuous CNN, and you’re likely to find a blinking funeral procession of urgent catastrophes, from urban unrest to terrorist attacks in Europe.
That dovetails into the third reason: Washington policy of late has been a searing failure. The federal consolidations of the past two decades have yielded chaos and recession. Government seems impenetrably tin-eared: confronted with economic downturn, they wreck the health insurance system; presented with failure in Iraq, they invade Libya. All this from a political class that has little in common with many of those it regulates.
These are serious problems for which there’s no easy panacea. Even 46 gold medals won’t do.
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