What Happened to America?

The profound collapse of the fundamental elements of a nation

What happened to America?

The answer to that question depends on how an individual defines or imagines America. Psychologists predict that something like 60% of us would define America by referencing the nation’s past. This historical viewpoint would be extremely common among those who voted for and are celebrating Donald Trump’s victory in the November election.

Most of the rest of us would define America as an aspiration. While I certainly spent many hours in the study of history, I was always drawn to a sense of America more closely resembling Lincoln’s vision. I have often said that we should all have an obligation to visit the Lincoln Memorial and read the inscriptions on the two walls on either side of the great statue. The language of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address tell us what America is and what it should be.

Regardless of whether one’s sense of America is rooted in what our nation has been or what it could become, there is little doubt that our nation is floundering.

What allows a society to function as a nation? Why are some nations stable and successful while others are seemingly in perpetual conflict and unable to provide basic services on a consistent basis?

Certainly, the most stable and successful nations are fortunate to have resources that allow them to have higher levels of prosperity. The United States is, perhaps, the most fortunate of all nations and by any measure we are prosperous.

A nation must have a system of government that provides a set of basic functions. National security, public safety, and economic stability are the most fundamental of functions. The most successful nations also provide public education, clean air and water, sanitation, and a system of healthcare.

The most stable nations also have three other essential components. First, the citizens have a high level of trust in core institutions, such as government, banking, schools, and religious institutions. Second, the citizens of those nations have widely shared values. Values are those ideas we think are virtuous and important. Finally, the stable nations have social networks that share truthful information.

So, what happened to America? We have lost trust in core institutions. Gallup polling in 2023 showed that only the military had a level of trust over 50%. The presidency, Congress, the judiciary, and bureaucracy all have levels of trust less than 30%. Similarly, our trust in religious organizations, financial institutions, and corporations have all cratered.

We no longer have a set of widely shared values. The standard set of widely shared American values dates from research conducted in a period of about 15 years after World War II. Those values were liberty, equality, individualism, democracy, and nationalism.

In the post WW II research, each of those values were supported by more than 90% of our society, and democracy was supported by nearly 100% of the society. Today, we no longer even share definitions of these five values.

Certainly, we have seen the disintegration of social networks that share truthful information. For roughly 150 years, our sources of news were fragmented. There were thousands of local newspapers and every remotely large city had tens of newspapers. Those papers were frequently highly partisan and had very different ideas of what met the standard of “news.”

Through those decades, we filtered our information through a set of social institutions that included churches and pubs as well as clubs and neighbors. Those filters helped people make some sense of the news and often led to a level of consensus about what was fact and fiction, good and bad.

Of course, that process was spread over days and weeks. There was ample time for the news to circulate and percolate in people’s brains. The information processing period began to diminish with large daily newspapers and the advent of radio. By the time of those post WW II studies, television was a key source of news, but the daily papers remained king. All of the news, regardless of source, was still widely discussed in our social institutions.

Now, that is virtually all obliterated. Newspaper circulations are a fraction of their former numbers and thousands of smaller, local papers have shuttered their operations. Television news is constantly available, but viewership is shrinking. Recent studies tell us that roughly 55% of adult Americans cite social media as their primary source of news.

Social media has also supplanted our former social institutions in many ways. If people visit with their neighbors, it is likely not about political news. Our religious organizations are more frequently overtly political and tend to reinforce the beliefs of the congregants regarding political issues and topics.

Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and Threads) will no longer conduct fact checking on information posted on the apps. Zuckerberg cited a belief in free speech, but the change was a clear capitulation to Trump for fear of retribution if they fact checked the all-mighty Donald.

The absolute chaos of information and ideas that has become the fundamental characteristic of social media is the antithesis of social networks that share truthful information. As a nation, we have not only lost our sense of truth and falsity, we have lost our willingness to operate from a set of shared truths.

Donald Trump is not wholly responsible for the collapse of our sense of truth and falsity, but he is primarily responsible. No president has ever needed fact checking at the level of Trump because no president has ever been as blatantly ignorant of basic facts. Further, no president has ever had so little regard for the institutions of the democracy he claims to love.

We are left to two things. First, we can observe the next four years and gauge the further damage to America – and it matters little if our view is historic or aspirational, because the damage will be certain. Second, we can see if there is enough left of America for us to be a functioning nation. It really is that basic.