Why I Still Believe In America

Despite its current troubles and the rise of the DSA, history shows that Americans are consistently able to maintain stability while creating positive change.

Allan J. Feifer | July 10, 2026

I have a friend I hold in high esteem: well-read, worldly, educated, and ever-thoughtful. Recently, she told me she has lost faith in America. In part, she wrote:

“America saved the Jews during WWII, but my point is that for all our blood and sacrifice, the world has thrown it away in the last 20 years. Is the world now better than it would have been but for America? I don’t think so—and I would have given a different answer before the year 2000.”

Arguably, this is one of the most pessimistic periods in our history. More than half of us have concluded that the country has passed its peak. Our institutions are failing, culture is unraveling, politics are irreparably broken, and the world America built after World War II is no longer recognizable.

I understand why they feel that way.

We see rising hostility toward our institutions, growing antisemitism, contempt for success, attacks on capitalism, and a political culture increasingly attracted to movements promising to tear everything down. We watch leftist candidates with remarkably shallow records of accomplishment defeating incumbents. Experience is dismissed as disqualifying rather than evidence of competence. Accomplishment is condemned where it should be admired.

America has lost its bearings.

I understand the temptation to believe my friend is right. I simply think she’s reached the wrong conclusion. America has never been great because it has avoided periods of turmoil. It has been great because it possesses an extraordinary capacity for self-correction.

That capacity is not an accident.

By the end of World War II, America stood as the undisputed leader of the free world. In prior decades, we had broken from Britain, established a constitutional republic centered on the revolutionary ideas of individual liberty and God-given rights, and then proceeded to build the most prosperous society the........

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