Is America Good?

I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing American flag-themed apparel, let alone flying the flag in public. I go out of my way to make sarcastic, biting jokes about America’s hypocrisy on national holidays, and scoff at my parents — loyalists to the Democratic Party — when they repeat the well-known bit about how “despite its many flaws, this is still a great nation.”

Yes, I’m a millennial. How could you tell? Like many of my peers, I’m prone to a deadly combination of pessimistic cynicism and utopian idealism. To most of us, the claim that corruption and injustice are bugs and not features of the American Project is a mark of being démodé, in denial of the truth, and insufferably cringe.

Mind you, my brand of millennial idealism is a special one. Just like a snowflake, I am unlike all the others. Being a moderate liberal or conservative was cringe, but so was being a woke SJW (or a far-right anti-woke reactionary). I was determined to be more countercultural than those who postured themselves as the vanguard of the counterculture — thus my attraction to the emerging post-liberal movement. There was something so alluringly “meta” about the narrative that American liberal democracy is problematic not just for systematically barring certain groups of people from accessing its promises, but because the promise itself is a deceptive one. It claims to respect freedom of religion, speech, and local institutions, while in reality it cuts us off from that which is most essential: God, family, and local community.

Of course, it’s very easy to play this game while living in the comfort of a liberal democratic country. “Among the many freedoms enjoyed by citizens in a democracy” writes the journalist Shadi Hamid in his latest book The Case for American Power, “one of the least appreciated is the freedom to panic and assume that the worst is yet to come. This is a right (and luxury) that is generally lacking under dictatorship.”

Hamid highlights that those of us living in liberal democracies have grown “accustomed to expressing either doubt or a kind of ironic detachment about our own success. To say that you love democracy or that you love America,” he concedes, “is to be decidedly uncool . . . I feel uncool just writing this.” Yet he affirms that his