Back to the Future

America’s flux capacitor needs a few banana peels before we can sustain 88 miles per hour.

For a nation supposedly in irreversible decline, America produces a remarkable number of critics who are among the most prosperous, educated, and comfortable people in human history. Many are wealthy themselves or the children of wealth, yet they speak as though they are victims of a uniquely unjust society that has somehow denied them an imagined state of perfection. They blame America not only for present frustrations but for historical sins that often bear little relation to their own opportunities or circumstances.

Even those who have achieved extraordinary success, influence, and status frequently argue that the nation should abandon its constitutional framework in favor of parliamentary systems, democratic socialism, or even outright communism. What is striking is not merely the criticism itself but the confidence that alternatives repeatedly shown to diminish liberty would somehow produce better outcomes.

The real question is why so many people who enjoy freedoms, prosperity, and opportunities unimaginable a century ago remain convinced that America’s greatest problem is too little government rather than too much, and why they seek ever more centralized solutions instead of returning to the constitutional and federalist principles that allow states and communities to pursue different paths without imposing a single vision on the entire nation.

There are several threads at work here, so I’ll try to break my thoughts down.

I have long argued that the flights of fantasy we witness is a disease of prosperity itself. It certainly seems when a society solves enough of the problems of basic safety and survival, people begin focusing on meaning, identity, fairness, and psychological fulfillment. A farmer in my home state of Mississippi in 1926 worried about crop failure, disease, and feeding his family whereas a college graduate in 2026 may worry about purpose, status, recognition, social belonging, or whether society perfectly reflects his moral ideals.

Material success does change the hierarchy of concerns.

There is also the phenomenon Tocqueville observed almost two centuries ago. He noted that as societies become more equal and prosperous, people often become more sensitive to the inequalities that remain. Expectations rise faster than conditions improve. If life improves by 90 percent but expectations improve by 95 percent, many people experience themselves as deprived despite living in circumstances their grandparents would have considered miraculous.

Another factor is historical consciousness detached from historical perspective. Modern education often emphasizes society’s failures more than its successes. Slavery, segregation, discrimination, and injustice are important subjects and should be studied honestly, but when those become the primary lens through which a nation is viewed, people can begin to see America less as a civilization that gradually corrected profound flaws and more as a continuous story of oppression.

The remarkable achievements become background noise while the failures become defining characteristics.

There is also a psychological component. Human beings need explanations for dissatisfaction. If someone is unhappy despite having education, comfort, opportunity, and social status, it can be easier to attribute that unhappiness to systemic failures than to confront the possibility that some dissatisfaction is simply part of the human condition – or the product of their own bad choices. The search for a perfect society is often a search for relief from problems that are not entirely political.

The irony is that many of the people advocating radical change are beneficiaries of the very system they condemn. That does not automatically make their criticisms invalid. Plenty of successful people have identified real problems. But it should make us cautious when the proposed solutions require abandoning institutions that have generated unprecedented prosperity, liberty, and stability.

As for why collectivist ideas continue to attract followers despite the historical record, several reasons stand out.

First, collectivist systems are often judged by their promises while market systems are judged by their outcomes. Socialism is compared to an idealized vision of equality and cooperation. Capitalism is compared to its actual imperfections. That is not a fair comparison. The proper comparison is between real capitalism and real socialism as they have existed.

Second, many people have little direct experience with the failures of collectivism. The Soviet Union is history, Mao’s China is history, Castro’s Cuba and Chavez’s Venezuela are just a bad dream. The costs become abstract while the promises remain emotionally appealing. It is more than an ignorance of history; it is a form of collective, willful amnesia.

Third, centralized solutions offer moral clarity. If government can simply mandate the desired outcome, the problem appears solved. Federalism, markets, local governance, and civil society are messier because they produce variation, disagreement, and uneven results. Many people prefer uniformity even when it comes at the expense of liberty.

Our generational taste for intervention to “make things better” has pulled America far from the federalism the Founders imagined – and specified. The Constitution’s original structure was designed in part to accommodate disagreement. If Massachusetts wants one policy and Tennessee wants another, federalism allows both to pursue different approaches without forcing a single national answer. That arrangement lowers the stakes of political conflict because losing a national election does not mean losing control over every aspect of public life. It also contains damage resulting from bad policies.

The deeper issue may be that Americans increasingly look to politics for answers that previous generations sought elsewhere. Family, church, local associations, civic organizations, and community once absorbed many social functions. As those institutions weakened, expectations of government expanded. Politics has become not merely a means of preserving liberty and maintaining order, but a vehicle for achieving social justice, personal fulfillment, emotional security, economic equality, and in some cases, retribution. No government can successfully carry all those burdens.

That is why the debate often feels disconnected from reality. One side is arguing about the limits of government and the tradeoffs inherent in every system. The other is often arguing from an implicit belief that a sufficiently enlightened government could eliminate most human problems. History suggests the former view is closer to reality. The tragedy of politics is that there is no perfect system, only less worse choices.

The achievements of the American constitutional order were never that they created perfection, it was that it created a framework that allowed free people to pursue their own visions of the good life while limiting the damage any one faction could inflict on everyone else.

The question is not whether America is perfect. It plainly is not and to paraphrase the remarks of Winston Churchill, America tries everything before it does the right thing and our form of governance is the worst ever conceived—except for all the others. The perfect government, like the perfect human, exists only in the imagination.

The question is whether the proposed alternatives have demonstrated a better record of preserving liberty, prosperity, and human dignity.

Thus far, the evidence suggests they have not.

The solution is to restore the limited government that made (makes) America great, not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In America’s case, less is most assuredly more.