The American Nightmare - an opportunity.

Today I read this article, called "Replant the American Dream," by Sebastian Mallaby. Normally, I skip over columns like this, expecting to read another bunch of statistics about income mobility, education, etc. But this time, for whatever whimsical reason (or maybe because I'm sick), I decided to read the article - and I found out that this writer was talking about a very different American dream.

To Mallaby, the American dream is one held by foreigners, who see America as a land of freedom, opportunity, and promise. Foreigners want to come here to study college, to start their own businesses, to work hard and give their children a better future. But more than that, they want to live in a good place, a place that respects human rights and individuals, where people are equal under the law.

This special place that we occupied in the hearts of people all over the world reaped incredible dividends for our country. It brought us the best and the brightest, scientists and entrepreneurs and engineers and writers and hard workers. It also brought us idealists, individualists who were not at home in the autocratic systems of their homelands. While Russia was for Russians, Japan for Japanese, and France for French, America was for anyone and everyone. This is what Mallaby calls "our seed corn -- the fact that we were different."

Note the past tense: were. Those Americans who, like me, live in other countries have felt the winds of world public opinion, and those winds are cold indeed. The zeitgeist is not on our side - attitudes toward America are turning sour, from Asia to Europe to Latin America. America is seen, accurately or not, as an aggressor, unstable, dangerous, and unfair. This shift is global, and extremely powerful. Our "seed corn" of positive image has already been almost totally eaten. And we are starting to feel the effects, as foreign science and engineering graduates - the core of our technology-based economy - are coming to America less and less.

Other countries worry about their natural resources or their populations; America's fundamental resource is our ideals. We need to renew the world's confidence in these ideals because, more than any other nation in history...(prepare for cheesy line)...we are the world. And getting our own populace to once again believe in America as an idea wouldn't exactly hurt either.

In this, I see an opportunity for liberalism. The idea that has most damaged the liberal cause is the notion - true or not - that American liberals don't believe in their country. The way to challenge that notion is not to say "Oh YEAH we do!". Rather, liberals should say "Look, practically no one in the world believes in our country right now. but we do. Now, unlike conservatives, we have a plan for making lots of people believe in America again."

Basically, conservatives have sat around and whined about liberal "anti-Americanism" without offering any way to win back the anti-Americans outside our borders. If liberals present the ways and means to improve our image - by taking leadership roles in multilateral institutions, by passing laws to explicitly ban torture, by promoting human rights in all countries, by effective advertising, etc. This will be a double victory - for America, because it corrects our biggest image problem, and for liberalism, because it effectively eliminates liberals' biggest image problem.

But to do it, liberals will have to stop grumbling when they see American flags on the backs of pickup trucks, and start thinking about - and talking about - ways to improve America's prestige worldwide.