Happy Americans Unhappy About Country

Dan Henninger has an article in the Wall Street Journal that reminds me of an election in Australia two or three decades ago. The Aussies were the beneficiaries of a spectacularly growing economy and everything seemed to be going there way under an adrministration that had been in power for over a decade.

Suddenly, the Land of Oz elected an opposition government. One bloke candidly admitted "We just felt like the other guys should get a chance."

In the UK in '45, war hero Winston Churchill was voted out of office to allow a cringing socialist, Clement Attlee [a victim of one of Churchill's immortal lines: "a sheep in sheep's clothing,"] to begin Britain's slow decline, only arrested by Margaret Thatcher thirty-five years later.

On New Year's Eve, Gallup's poll delivered unto us the good news that 84% of Americans say they are satisfied with how things are going for them personally. What Woody Allen might say about that phenomenal datum of good cheer one can only guess. One then has to account for the darker data Gallup released two weeks earlier: Some 70% of those responding believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction.

Let's see what the Queen of Hearts loons who believe in impossible things say:

Explanations for this paradox would fill screen after screen of comments on Internet blogs, written no doubt by the 16% who can never be satisfied with "how things are going." Sample: It's the 46 million uninsured, stupid!

The Queen of Hearts crowd doesn't really care about the 46 million, they just want to eliminate the opposition. Cut off heads. Democracy doesn't work for an irreducible minimum in every country, who are "bad seed," as a Taylor Caldwell novel was once named. When I was in SDS, I met a dude named Mark Rudd who stayed in my apartment in Ann Arbor. He smoked all my ganga & told me the immortal line: "Dare to cheat, dare to win."

I googled him the other day. Like most of the '68 radicals, he is a loo-zer living in the past. I met Diana Oughton back then, a radiant presence who was hanging out with bad companions. Less than a year later, she blew herself up in a Greenwich Village townhouse down the street from Dustin Hoffman & my aunt/second-cousin's townhouses. Dead in her '20s. "Only the good die young." Henninger elaborates:

If the possibility of human progress strikes you as so much background noise to the higher calling of political street-fighting, turn immediately to today's installment of Mitt versus Mike. Don't get me wrong, it is great theater. The perfect last act to a year spent living out of suitcases in Iowa was the irrepressible Elizabeth Edwards's verbal poke Monday to the eye of Michelle Obama. The Democratic candidates are kind of boring compared to their spouses.

None of this is to suggest that what is at stake in the election doesn't matter, or that those deeply invested in it are mis-allocating life's limited days. It matters.

It is to suggest that the never-off eye of modern political media leaves the impression that nothing good is possible. If progress happens, as with the surge in Iraq or a new therapy for cancer, it must be diminished by "analysis," listing four things that could "go wrong." As a way to absorb the way the world works, this is depressing. Good things happen. Get over it.

Class warfare doesn't work except as a corrosive Nietzchean scream of self-destruction. It is a cancer of the brain. Here's more good news the media will bury in its penchant to accentuate the negative:

In 1980, deaths per 100,000 U.S. children aged 5 to 14 was 30.6; by 2004, that number fell to 16.8. Some 25 years ago, daily cigarette smoking among 12th graders was about 21%; in 2006 it was about 12% for both males and females. Childhood immunizations are rising steadily.

In August, the Centers for Disease Control noted that the death rate in 2004 fell by 3.8% in a year, "a record low historical figure." Life expectancy for men and women at birth in 1940 was 63 years; it is now nearly 78 years. We, or someone, must be doing something right.

Many people think that the war in Iraq was a mistake. It indeed contributes to the belief that the U.S. is on the wrong track. This will be argued more deeply when just two candidates are running, and millions of voters will weight Iraq heavily in their November choice. So be it.

That said, the remarkable 12-month progress of the surge strategy demonstrated it is not beyond the ability of "the system" to respond to seemingly overwhelming problems. Credit is due to Gen. David Petraeus certainly, but an infrastructure of U.S. military brains went into designing the Army's Counterinsurgency Manual, published in 2006. Its bibliography includes many studies published since 2003. As such it represents the U.S. military's "best practices" on fighting a modern enemy like al Qaeda, and the surge's success showed we are not helpless before this latest form of nihilism. This to some may be bitter progress, but it is so.

Evil exists and some people actively promote it. "Born under a bad sign..." "Born to be wild..."

One needs reminding, amid a presidential election as wide open as this, that however other nations wrestle with their wrong directions, we use the system that the Founding Fathers left for us. What's worth remembering is that they knew politics piles up retarding levels of animosity, and so created a political system that would let us both vent spleen and move forward. Our progress, though, would nearly always be slow and by increments. Sometimes, it's hard to notice.

There are hateful people out there and they enjoy hating.

It will continue to be the case here that people are going to kvetch over corners of the culture--over immigration and national identity, or over relative wage levels, even as the rest of the world's poor finally start to join the middle class through globalizing trade channels (suppress those trade flows, as Congress is threatening, and you'll discover the real meaning of wrong direction). And not least there will be--and should be--concern over whether the progress I've described has the time or space in its good life for a sturdy spiritual soul.

The New Year demands an admission that some good has been achieved, not by the wave of a politician's magic wand but through many daily hands at work in the nation.

Eighty-four percent of Americans are self-declared "happy" people. America is the only nation founded on the principle of "the pursuit of happiness." Sounds like a success story to me.

But the media will give you the many reasons why I'm wrong.