Story by Josh Tint, photograph by Jason Hafso

From the moment Americans are born, we are bombarded with the message that the United States is the greatest nation on earth. It is a sentiment that’s often lorded over us as a political tool; the official slogan of the 2020 Trump campaign was, “Keep America Great.” Yet, by nearly any quantifiable measure, America is not the greatest nation on earth and certainly not as great as it could be. Yes, our economy is the biggest in the world, yet we do not harness that economy to improve the lives of our citizens. Americans are not the happiest in the world, nor the best educated, nor the highest-paid. American life expectancy is lower than it was a decade ago.

Despite this, we refuse to take the concrete steps needed to improve ourselves. We haven’t amended our Constitution in 28 years, one of the longest gaps in our history. Common-sense reforms like the Equal Rights Amendment, the abolition of the Electoral College, and statehood for Washington, D.C. have languished, even when they have the public support to succeed. Senator Marsha Blackburn recently scorned the idea of amending the Constitution at all, claiming that the Founding Fathers’ great vision should not be modified. Yet, by making such assertions, we ignore the Founding Fathers’ greatest vision: that constitutional modification would be necessary. If Americans really want to become a part of the greatest nation on earth, we must face reality and make sensible changes.

Yet, the notion of American greatness has never rested on facts; it’s made up of ideals. Freedom, democracy, and equality are all vacuously waved around to support the notion that we somehow stand far above every other country. Historically, this notion became Manifest Destiny whereby American greatness was conflated with American supremacy. Today, continuing to assert American greatness in the face of mounting evidence puts us at risk of taking the parts of America that really are great for granted. While we praise the US as ostensibly free and democratic, we ignore that the US was recently downgraded to a “Flawed Democracy” on the EIU’s democracy index. Notably, this puts us behind Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Chile, countries which we often denigrate as “Third World.”

Certainly, we can no longer afford to take our democracy for granted. When terrorists stormed the US capitol this January, they desecrated not only physical but ethereal testaments to American greatness. The 2020 election has been the least peaceful since the Civil War. Following it, the rhetoric spewed by Donald Trump resembled the incessant tantrums of a toddler, the exact kind of evidence-free bluster that he once used to assert America’s greatness. Is it really any surprise that, with a national culture obsessed with excellence and winning, we’re no longer equipped to handle losing?

In order to move forward as a nation, we must begin with a realistic assessment of our current situation. America is not the greatest country on earth. It is broken, abused, and dangerously close to failure. In addition to systemic issues that have plagued the land for generations, we are now faced with growing division, a massive recession, and a global pandemic. Without recognizing the truth of these issues, it will be impossible for us to solve them. However, we have the ability to solve these problems if we can only stop fantasizing about our status. Instead of continuing to assert American greatness obliviously, we should make this a historic opportunity to prove American greatness.