Need a New Economic Vision? Gotcha Covered.

• Author: Glastris, Paul
• Position: Editor's Note

The American Promise isn't looking too promising to a lot of Americans.

Many young people, especially those with a college education, think the country is basically irredeemable. In their view, it was founded on racism, sexism, and genocidal colonialism, and all the Framers' fine words about equality of opportunity are sick jokes played on marginalized communities. The only possibility of real change, these Millennial and Gen Z Americans believe, is to fundamentally reprogram how average people think and to replace capitalism with Scandinavian-style socialism--and they rate the chance of those happening before they reach an impoverished old age and/or the Earth becomes uninhabitable at about zero.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the age-educational-ideological spectrum, a sizable chunk of the electorate thinks America is decadent. To them, it is obvious that the Christian values they believe undergird constitutional liberties have eroded to the point of near collapse; that illegal immigrants are being invited in to dilute their political power; that wokeness and pedophilia have infested all the country's institutions; and that if these threats can't be beaten back through electoral politics, then authoritarian means will have to do.

In between are the majority of Americans. They don't buy into these apocalyptic worldviews. But they aren't feeling too cheery about America's future, either, with the country's politics so poisonous and their own economic situations so perilous.

It could be that the darkest fears prove accurate, and that America has crossed a point of no return toward inevitable decline. Perhaps the next election will be the last truly democratic one. It's possible that real or perceived antidemocratic moves by one party will lead to a violent insurgency by followers of the other. At the very least, it's easy to see the political trench warfare of a country split roughly 50-50, with one party representing the majority of voters and GDP and the other a majority of acreage, continuing to hinder the actions necessary to deal with mass generational downward mobility and the growing oligarchic control of the economy that are the primary fuel of today's fiery political dissention.

But there is another possibility: that we've not crossed a point of no return but have stepped back from it. The defeat of so many antidemocratic MAGA candidates in swing states this past November is one sign, but I think it's bigger than that. A decade and...