Never Bet Against the USA

Last week I watched an amazing video on X. A new Tesla rolled off the assembly line in Texas and autonomously drove itself to the new owner’s home. Who would have imagined that? It’s things like this that make me think: maybe the future in America is going to be awesome after all.

There’s a lot to be pessimistic about in our country. Political polarization. The national debt. A failed leadership class. Declining trust. Falling family formation and fertility rates. A general sense of malaise. A rising peer competitor in China.

But it’s important to remember that America has been in worse straits in the past. Slavery and its legacy were cracks in the moral foundation of the country. The Civil War threatened the very existence of the Union. Mass immigration in the late 19^th and early 20^th century created an identity crisis for the country. The Great Depression caused deep distress and a credibility crisis for capitalism whose effects remain with us in the form of our regulatory state. The Cold War found us facing a peer competitor bent on global domination and with a nuclear arsenal that could reduce our country to ash. Multiple of our Presidents have been assassinated.

In all of these cases we managed to pull though even stronger than before.

Betting against the United States has never been a winner. America has had what Japanese scholar Fuji Kamiya calls “a reserve power that allows it to overcome both the inadequacies of its leaders and the foibles of its citizens.”

America’s unique genius is that it’s a protean nation. It’s constantly making and remaking itself, pressing forward, heading to the frontier. Destabilizing changes that might sink a traditional country have, in America, been successfully incorporated into an updated national character. 

This can be disconcerting to those who prefer that things stay the same, to those who prefer a more rooted and stable existence. But that’s always been a minority position in America, which is one reason a certain kind of conservatism has never had much purchase here. In America, even conservatism is a dynamic force, celebrating the entrepreneur, the innovator, the comeback kid, the one who reinvents himself. 

That dynamism has never truly left us. Elon Musk, the man who brought us that driverless Tesla, is the person who made electric vehicle sales and production at scale a reality, who created a national charging station network, who is pushing the envelope on driverless cars, who reinvented space launch technology with reusable rockets, who revolutionized satellite communication, who helped kickstart the AI revolution – and who plans to colonize Mars. 

That’s just one man. But it shows that we still have it, when we want to. All over this country there are people doing amazing things. And there are many others with the potential to do it, if we set them loose and empower them to do so. 

Or think about when the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed. A new bridge was open in just 13 months. It’s just not true that America can’t build anymore. We still know how to do it. We just don’t allow ourselves to. That’s a problem, but a fixable one.

Look, there’s no guarantee America is going to remain prosperous forever. Every generation faces its own challenge and has to rise to the occasion. Every generation has to earn it again. We start with a magnificent inherited legacy. But we can’t just rest on that. We have to sustain it, and add to it to bequeath to future generations.

We have serious problems. I’ll be the first to say that I don’t know how to fix many of them. The logical move in many cases is to simply check out, to abandon what’s failing and focus on insulating yourself and your family from the fallout of social decay. I don’t blame anyone who makes that choice. In fact, most of us are making that choice in at least some domains.

But the world is full of possibilities we can’t even imagine. America has always found a way to rise to the challenge in the past. And I believe we will find a way to do it again this time too.