It's not as bad as you think it is: misguided handwringing about our society's decline distracts us from the real crises.

• Author: Lehman, Nicholas

One of President Clinton's main challenges in his second term is going to be trying to move the United States away from a self-conception as a nation in crisis. It's a problem partly of his own making. In his 1995 State of the Union address, for example, delivered right on the heels of the big Republican sweep in the 1994 elections, Clinton said, "[Far] more than our material riches are threatened; things far more precious to us--our children, our families, our values... The values that used to hold us together seem to be coming apart" That was the speech in which he called for a New Covenant that would address America's problems "above all, how can we repair the damaged bonds in our society..."

In saying this, Clinton was not imposing his own eccentric views on the rest of us. He probably had been reading polls that told him such sentiments would strike a responsive chord, and even if he hadn't, many other people were painting the same picture more luridly. Newt Gingrich has a standard speech line that reads, "No civilization can survive with 12-year-olds having babies, with 15-year-olds killing each other, with 17-year-olds dying of AIDS, with 18-year-olds getting diplomas they can't read" A stream of books about the fraying of the American social fabric has been published over the last few years; the current occupant of the best-seller list in this category, whose title says it all, is Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrab.

It will be very difficult for us to explain to our grandchildren why the United States in the mid-1990s thought of itself in such a bleak way. Our country is as triumphant as any has ever been. We have no external enemies who pose a real threat. We are at peace. We are not in a depression or a recession. The unemployment rate is relatively low. The political system is stable. Compared to the run of American history, let alone world history, this is an unusually calm moment.

Even if you take it as a given that Americans are going to pick something to hand-wring about, pervasive social decay is not the obvious choice. All through the 1980s and up through the 1992 presidential election, the main national concern was with the economy, not the society. You would think that if social concerns came to the fore during the past five years, it would be in response to alarming social developments over that time. In fact, it has been a phenomenon floating free of reality, driven by no actual contemporary developments.

The...