The Five Biggest Challenges Facing America
The Five Biggest Challenges Facing America
Day-to-day political arguments sometimes draw us away from the larger questions of politics and culture. One of the most important is the question of priorities: What are the biggest threats and challenges facing the country?
Even people who more or less agree on particular policies may disagree wildly on what should be our most urgent priorities. People who vote for tax cuts, for example, might nonetheless deride as “Zombie Reaganism” an emphasis on marginal rate cuts. People who are pro-life and against woke indoctrination nonetheless complain that Republicans are obsessed with “culture wars.” People who may vote for aid to Ukraine nonetheless demand to know why we’re more interested in defending its borders than our own. These are, fundamentally, arguments about priorities.
When I ask myself what worries me the most — what the biggest challenges facing the country are — five issues come to mind.
First, do we still believe in the American idea? The single largest crisis facing America today is whether or not the American people will remain committed to the American idea. We like to say that Americans can do anything we set our minds to — but that will remain true only so long as we remain Americans. What makes us Americans is the American idea, by which I mean the whole package:
- A democratic republic in which the government responds to the commands of the people and has no permanent privileged class immune to popular pressure.
- The constitutional rule of written law, in which everybody is bound by the same rules and agrees to abide by the outcomes of the political system.
- Civil liberties for all on equal terms, including free speech, freedom of religious conscience, and due process of law.
- Free markets and the right and responsibility of every individual to live off the fruits of his or her own labor and improve his or her own lot in life.
- A baseline of pluralism, by which we tolerate disagreement, manage to live with people who have fundamentally different worldviews, and accept the common rules of the political game.
The gravest threat to these values continues to be progressivism and its dissemination through our schools, Hollywood, and the media. Woke ideology and its variants (DEI, CRT, cancel culture, and all the rest) attack the essential props of a society that is based on the equality and liberty of the individual. Living constitutionalism and the administrative state attack the whole concept of government by written law, enacted through representative democracy and accountable to the people. And Democrats for the past quarter century have been attacking the legitimacy of our entire political system. Mass immigration, beyond a certain point, can also undermine the American idea if we simply take in too many people too quickly to acculturate them into our ways of thinking.
But 2020–21 saw Donald Trump assault the basic norm of accepting electoral defeat, and the second Trump administration has emboldened the forces on the right that reject free markets and chafe at legal restraints on their own side. There’s a broader decline, which crosses party lines, in the public’s understanding of American civics, belief in civic virtue, and engagement with our neighbors. Today’s right can’t defend the American idea only by fighting its political enemies; it must also restrain and educate its friends and constituents. The nation’s 250th birthday in 2026 ought to present a golden opportunity to revive our common understanding of the American idea — but if the president drives us into an economic ditch, that opportunity could be overshadowed by more rancor and mistrust.
Second, do we still have enough Americans? Our American idea is only useful so long as there are people to believe in it. Great periods of growth in our wealth, power, standard of living, and cultural influence have typically been times when our population was growing — usually by high birth rates and relatively high levels of immigration. The former is important to sustain the social confidence and cohesion to ensure that the latter is an asset, not a dependency.
Yet birth rates are collapsing around the developed world, and America is not immune. Declining rates of family formation (for reasons cultural and economic) and resurgent rates of abortion are two vitally important pieces of the wider problem. An era of population decline would undermine all of the fiscal and financial assumptions behind our entitlement state as well as our free market economy. Until we can restore the bedrock values that create and sustain the begetting, bearing, and raising of children, America runs the risk of becoming a great, ornate, but empty mansion.
Third, are we going broke? Looming fiscal catastrophe is yet another area in which America is not alone, but that is not much consolation. Nearly a quarter of our GDP is now spent just on the federal government, never mind the cost of state and local governments. Interest payments on the ever-mounting national debt will soon eclipse every category of federal spending except for entitlements. The combination of debt service and entitlement spending on Social Security and Medicare means that almost half of the federal budget every year is automatically spent without requiring the approval of our elected representatives.
This is not sustainable, and yet, on our current trajectory, spending on debt service and entitlements will grow as a share of our national income every year until the sun burns out. There is zero political will among Republicans to put the brakes on this, and Democrats are interested only in hitting the gas pedal.
Fourth, is the world getting away from us? Foreign enemies will likely always be with us, but what should alarm us is the prospect that they are uniting their causes and expanding their spheres of influence. The de facto, and sometimes more than just de facto, new axis of China, Russia, and Iran represents a bloc of resistance to the American idea, geographically consolidated across the center of the Eurasian landmass. Its tentacles are expanding in multiple directions, and China in particular is building its navy and armed forces in ways that will strain our capacity and will to keep pace. This requires a brand of grand strategic thinking on our part to strengthen the alliances of the free world against them — it now appears, however, that the Trump-Vance team wants our strategic posture to move in precisely the opposite direction.
Fifth, have we lost our American character of resilience and flexibility? This one may be the hardest to pin down. America used to not only build things quickly — physical things as well as institutions — but also rebuild them quickly. As I’ve written before:
In wartime, time is a vital factor. The Union’s victory over the Confederacy and the American victory over Imperial Japan were heavily dependent upon our capacity to turn out warships at a speed and volume unmatched by our adversaries, from the Monitor to the legendary repair of the USS Yorktown in 48 hours to have it available for the Battle of Midway. In the past, a complacent America could afford to skimp on armaments in peacetime because it could ramp up quickly at need. But today’s America is a jungle of red tape, in which the going in any project of building anything is slow and laborious. The Ukraine war has illustrated the dangers to the Army of a perilously slow pace of production for munitions.
This isn’t just a war-fighting issue. It’s being tested in the rebuilding of California after its devastation by wildfires, and even progressives such as Ezra Klein have recently been discussing how red tape and constituency politics make it impossible to build things quickly in America. Similarly, the bundling of woke politics with our established institutions — and, more broadly, the unresponsiveness and decay of many of those institutions — is enabled by barriers to creating new institutions in a nation where it was once routine to open a new newspaper or university when the old ones were found wanting.
If we can surmount these five challenges, we can handle almost anything the next century throws our way.
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