Do many other Americans wake up anxious, after dreams that have nothing to do with their parents or their jobs, but stem from today’s prospects for the world?
Many nightmares have come true since 2001. Many of us feel bigger ones looming. Your biggest fear will depend on your phobias, politics, or personal situation. But how many of us see deep festering problems, unaddressed and ready to explode into catastrophe, this year?
Before even trying to catalogue the pending disasters, note that many share three features.
First, many feel truly beyond our control. Solutions might feel technically impossible. Many would require a concertation of people’s efforts that only follows years of constructive engagement between diverse groups. You might fear that America’s debt burden will lead to a collapse in national solvency, knowing that the load is unpayable by any measures ever contemplated in Congress, that stopgap funding measures hang on thin threads of political cooperation, and that our polarized politics could cut those threads at any time. You might fear that the Ukraine War will lead to nuclear war, knowing that Vladimir Putin is ruthless, that at this stage we have no influence over him, and that his people have none either. You might fear a Trump victory in November, or a Biden one followed by a Kamala Harris administration, or both – and see no other candidacies on the horizon. And so on, for homelessness, artificial intelligence, America’s southern border, climate change, racism, Taiwan, another pandemic …
Second, most of our “unthinkables” could happen suddenly. One more botched federal debt deal could finally wreck confidence in US Treasury securities and render every financial instrument suspect. One previously undetected hack could paralyze electricity supply, payments, and TV. One electro-magnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon could put society in the dark ages. One more race riot, of whoever against whomever, could trigger civil war.
Third, our choices of “top fear” do not match each other’s, and differences often reflect social and political hostility. This means any catastrophes that occur could raise further civil unrest. It also means we lack common language even to argue over what’s an Armageddon scenario and what’s just a bogeyman.
We absolutely must at least have some common language. Currently, if anyone asserts that the sky is blue, there will be a political argument from “the other side.” We will not agree which dangers are dire and which might be survivable. We will not address festering issues that could explode with one misstep. And we certainly will not be able to concert national efforts to fix multi-faceted, multi-layered, complex problems.
Even if we cannot fix or forestall disaster, we will need common language to start any repair, rebuild, or re-adjustment to new realities.
Can we imagine a basic American comity that allows for common language? The chance that we can’t may be our scariest nightmare.
That said, Americans do have something to work with. The nation conceived itself as “one People,” separating from another, and identified this People as “we,” who hold certain self evident truths. This national self-conception names no blood or tongue, church or soil, only the belief that all humans are equally and inherently endowed with personal rights, and that government exists to secure those rights. Scholars of right and left (in today’s constricted language), while faulting current practice in divergent ways, agree on this core of American identity.
On the platform of this creed of the Declaration of Independence, America has a starting point to address any and all “unthinkables.” We need to acknowledge that this creed is not a cookbook, particularly not for me to prove my mindset right, or anyone else’s wrong. It requires us to accept the “other side,” even if repulsive, as co-nationals, sharing our interest in the founding tenets and in this vessel for them that we call the nation. The logic of this abstract creed permits this acceptance, and demands judgment and commitment from each of us.
Making this commitment, we embrace our founding as a society and a nation. Engaging each other honestly but in shared interest, we show that a nation conceived in such liberty can endure in a dog-eat-dog world. We have to start now. If we do, we re-validate this nation, conceived in liberty as no other, for any challenge the future may bring.
Common Conviction 