The Crisis of American Exceptionalism
By Marc Dunkelman
- August 13, 2014
Beneath the barrage of depressing headlines in the nation’s newspapers today lurks a more ominous question: is America in decline? In a recent Time magazine poll, more than 80 percent of Americans expressed a belief that the last several years had seen the United States take a step back. The oft-repeated promise of the American Dream—that the future will be better than the past, and that the next generation will have it better than those who came before—now seems increasingly far-fetched.
It’s not difficult to understand why. As one analyst recently pointed out, not since the Great Depression has median income fallen so steadily for so long. And the economic effects of our fall from grace correspond to a familiar litany of disheartening indicators: among the globe’s thirty-five most advanced economies, the United States ranks thirty-fourth in child poverty. We rank twenty-eighth when it comes to four-year-olds in preschool, and fourteenth in the percentage of young adults with post-secondary degrees. Our obesity rate is ten times that of Japan, and we’ve fallen behind most of Europe in measures of social mobility. At the same time, we’ve put a larger percentage of citizens behind bars than many of the world’s most repressive regimes.
Read more: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/08/13/the_crisis_of_american_exceptionalism_123644.html#ixzz3AJ5ejDwk
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