The United States Is A Pretty Damn Good Place With A Lot Of Room For Improvement

A July 6 reflection on adopting an appropriately moderate stance on AMURRRRICA

When I was 24 years old or so, working a fun but low-profile job as an online editor at the Center for American Progress’s youth wing, I asked Jon Chait, one of my favorite writers, if he’d meet up with me. Because he is a mensch, he agreed to, and we got lunch in D.C. somewhere. 

At one point I was complaining about how flawed the U.S. was and how vital it was to fix things, and Chait responded, in his characteristically mild manner something like: Well, a few generations ago our ancestors lived in villages where sometimes other people would come in and just ransack everything and kill everyone. Things aren’t that bad.

The point wasn’t that the U.S. was perfect — Chait didn’t and doesn’t think the U.S. is perfect, and around that time he published a book criticizing conservative economic policy for making life harder for Americans while enriching the wealthy. But the sense I get, looking back on that conversation, was that Chait was trying to cool the jets of a young and passionate would-be intellectual type who was reciting lefty mantras rather than really thinking things through.

Whenever I engage in the navel-gazing act of thinking about how my views have changed since I started writing professionally, I remember that conversation, because I think it captured something important.

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Despite the fact that I spend a lot more of my time criticizing the left than I used to, I haven’t undergone any bona fide ideological transformation over the years, except at the edges. I’ve always thought the United States’ social safety net should be more expansive and fairer than it is. In many ways our country screws over poor people, or people thrust into sudden financial emergencies, in ways that seem brutally unfair and unnecessary, given the prevailing policies in other wealthy, industrialized nations, and given the sheer wealth we have at our disposal. I also have extremely strong liberal/libertarian views about freedom, and came of age politically at a time when anti-sodomy laws had only recently been deemed unconstitutional, conservatives (and some liberals) were endorsing the insane idea of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and youth culture was even more of a scapegoat for the world’s ills than it usually is.