Why America is the Greatest Country in the World
In all sincerity
One of my favorite movies of all time (which also conveniently premiered during a formative period of my life in high school) is Thank You For Smoking, where the protagonist of the film, Nick Naylor, is a charismatic lobbyist for Big Tobacco. On its face, it’s a very unusual piece of cinema, but the premise, the characters, the writing, and plotting are all top notch. In a scene from the movie, Nick’s son asks his dad for help writing an essay on why American government is the best government in the the world.
It’s a great scene that’s also a neat encapsulation of the movie itself. If you enjoyed that clip, I wholeheartedly recommend watching the entire thing. It’s a great film that still holds up well to this day (has it really been 19 years since it came out? Man, I’m getting old).
I bring up the movie and that scene in particular because it’s the cynical interpretation par excellence of the Federal government and the country. If you spend a decent amount of your time reading highbrow publications that opine on the issues of the day, that cynical tone and style is inescapable. Much of our discourse, even outside of politics, is focused on and captured by the dreadful and despicable events within this country of 330 million people.
That cynical and pessimistic disposition has also become shorthand for intelligence, sophistication, and being well informed. Read the newspaper, go on social media, or turn on the television, and you’ll find somebody of relatively high status fretting or raging over the latest Bad Thing that’s surely a sign of the decline and fall of the country. And yet.
We’re Number One
This is still the most prosperous and powerful country in the world. This is still the country where immigrants come and make their fortune. This is still the country that has the brightest minds churning out world changing research at the best universities. This is still the country that other countries implicitly and instinctively look to for leadership on any problem of global significance.
Yes, you can quibble around the margins, you can argue about the (lack of) seriousness of our politics, you can doom about Biden (or Trump), you can worry that things are on the decline, but with this incessant focus of all that is wrong with the country, we lose track of everything that is right.
We have the world’s largest economy and the most GDP per capita out of any country with a population greater than 10 million.
We have the world’s most powerful military, capable of projecting overwhelming force anywhere in the world within a week’s notice.
We have the world’s largest and most dynamic private sector, with 15 of the 20 most valuable companies in the world.
We have the world’s best research universities and scientists, with American researchers having won an absolute majority of science related Nobel Prizes since the beginning of the 21st century, with many foreigners having won being associated with American universities as well.
We have the world’s most influential and pervasive culture; the lingua franca of international business and the internet is American English. Both high culture and low, people around the world look to the US and, knowingly or unknowingly, mimic what we do.
Those are incredible advantages, and it’s something we take for granted every single day. But people around the world are much more aware of it, which is why they still come in droves to our country in search of a better life.
Personal Story Time
I was born in China. My dad was able to come over to study on a student visa and was able to stay after he graduated and found gainful employment. While he was studying, he was able to bring my mother and I as well. I was 2 and a half when I first stepped foot in this country. I was 18 when I first returned back to the country of my birth in the summer of 2006.
I remember visiting my dad’s hometown (a rural village in northeastern China) and thinking how poor the place felt in comparison. When I talked to some family friends around my age, one of them expressed a desire to move to Russia for work. I asked her why not go to the US instead and she said something I’ll never forget: “Everybody wants to go to the US, but it’s much more realistic to get to Russia”.
Most of my friends are political liberals, and they too had picked up on the cynical and pessimistic view of the US. It seemed to me that a lot of their criticism of the US was a kind of jockeying for status within the very liberal social sphere I was a part of. It seemed a point of pride that they could, without hesitation, recite all of the ways in which the US fell short to other developed countries.
Complaints about the US irked me. I remember somebody arguing that it was impossible to save on an average income in the US, and I countered with “the average Chinese makes the US minimum wage (even after adjusting for local price differences) and manages to save over 30%” and they said “well we’re not in China, we’re in the US”. It didn’t occur to me until much later that there was an implicit “the US is supposed to be great and amazing, unlike these shithole countries”.
Greatness For Granted
In general, I’ve found that when Americans complain about America, it carries an implicit “if we’re number 1, why doesn’t it feel like we’re number 1?” behind the complaint. A sportswriter (Bill Simmons, I think) once wrote something to the effect of “sometimes I have to remind myself that Roger Federer isn’t American. We, as a country, tend to root for excellence and foreigners who are at the top of their sport just feel like they are Americans or could be Americans”. That’s a jingoistic thought, to be sure, but it captured something real that exists in the American psyche. America is excellent. To be American is to be excellent. And if things aren’t excellent, we expect things to change so that it can be excellent.
The national attitude is not “que sera sera”. The attitude is “things are great, and if they aren’t, we’ll make it great”. It sounds suspiciously close to “Make America Great Again”, but a common retort to MAGA was “America is already great!” This country expects and demands greatness.
It would be one thing if we expect greatness and consistently found mediocrity or worse, but Americans are at the top of the game in so many facets of life that we take greatness for granted. We panic if things aren’t great, if we’re not number one. That’s what jolted the nation when Sputnik launched during the Cold War (we’re not number 1 in this brand new activity of space exploration? Well we will be soon, damnit!) and that same principle is driving our strategy and attitude against China (“we will stay no. 1 and China will never get close to us”).
If you go by averages, sure, the average American is not particularly great. The average American is dumber, more violent, and less healthy than their counterparts from other developed countries. But the greatest Americans are the greatest in the world, and we have a lot more of those kinds of people than any other country in the world. Combine that with our collective belief in our national greatness, and it’s greatness all the way down, baby.
This is a great country. The greatest country in the world. Call it cringe, gauche, or link me that clip from The Newsroom where Aaron Sorkin’s stand-in rants about how America is not the greatest country in the world (even though that speech also contains the same expectations of greatness that I described in this article). But it’s true. And if you’re reading this, just take a moment today and revel in the fact that in this brief moment in time, you’re living in the greatest country in the world.
