By James Pethokoukis

“White Americans are far more pessimistic about the future than Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans are,” says my colleague Daniel A. Cox in a recent report from AEI’s Survey Center on American Life. While pessimism was a minority position among Hispanic, Asian, and Black Americans, 60 percent of Whites responded that they were either somewhat pessimistic or very pessimistic about the future of the United States.

Of course, the rosier your view of the past, the less room you leave for optimism looking ahead. It’s unsurprising, then, that White evangelical Protestants (two-thirds of whom responded pessimistically) were the most gloomy group polled.

And looking at Americans as a whole, three-quarters of respondents said that the country has been getting worse. It’s a sort of pessimism that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy by limiting our willingness to think about the future in the long run. If the country is declining, why bother investing in its future?

One antidote to this declinism that undercuts long-term thinking going forward is to adopt long-termism looking back. Cox: “The vast majority (90 percent) of Americans who say things are generally getting better in the US say this is happening slowly over time. Conversely, the majority (61 percent) of those who say things have been getting worse believe it is happening very quickly.” To ensure a better future, let’s adopt a long-term view and remember the immense progress we’ve enjoyed over the last few centuries doesn’t have to end!

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