Last week, a Wall Street Journal-NORC poll found that only 25 percent of Americans believe “they have a good chance of improving their standard of living.” Even more bleak, roughly 70 percent of people said the American dream — “that if you work hard, you will get ahead — no longer holds true or never did.” That is “the highest level in nearly 15 years of surveys.”
The state of the union is gloomy.
The survey couldn’t come at a more ironic moment — just before the 63rd anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s famous Sept. 12, 1962 speech in which he pledged that America would land a man on the moon.
Nowadays, we remember the speech for the ambitious goal — delivered in classic Kennedy fashion, with soaring oratory and a telegenic grin. But there’s much more to the speech than just a call to action. If read carefully, it’s a rhapsody to America’s unique relationship to optimism. And, now more than ever, it should be required reading for an electorate that senses that the next generation of Americans will be worse off than the ones before.
To fully understand the speech, we first need to flashback to five years earlier.
On Oct. 4, 1957, two events — one threatening, the other heartening — seeped into America’s living rooms. At 7:45 p.m., the Huntley Brinkley Report broke the news that the Soviet Union had launched the satellite Sputnik. Communism had won the first lap of the Space Race. Tuned in to their televisions and radios, Americans could actually hear the distant staccato beeping of the satellite, peering down on us from high above.
The other event, on many of the same television screens, was the debut of the sitcom “Leave It to Beaver.” Fifteen minutes after the jarring reality of Sputnik, here was a sappy image of an American middle class that could do it all. A one-income family could enjoy a country club membership, a large house, complete with a book-lined study, and a nice car fueled by 24-cent-a-gallon gas. Right after the distressing news, the show provided a black-and-white view of a country where anything was possible in the golden age of American optimism — even as it struggled with civil, voting and women’s rights.
That brings us to Rice University five years later, where Kennedy sought to reenergize the country after the U.S. had once more fallen behind in the Space Race when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space.
This backdrop is crucial to understand the duality of Kennedy’s words. We all remember the cheerful pronouncement that “We choose to go to the moon,” but it’s the part that comes after that is most important.
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,” Kennedy said, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
It’s an ode to constructive pessimism. I have written about this concept before, drawing on Robert Kaplan’s book “Warrior Politics,” where he argues that America’s Founders created a sustainable democracy not based on naive optimism, but on a gritty understanding of human nature. That’s why, Kaplan argues, the Founders understood the need to include a way to impeach a president before our country had ever elected one.
Kennedy’s speech didn’t console Americans; it challenged them. It laid out the sacrifice that would be required to beat the Soviet Union. Kennedy brought us together, based on a common national interest and foe — rather than seeking to divvy up the population into electorally advantageous groups or pit Americans against each other to satisfy his own self-interest.
Our national character of constructive pessimism is what has actually made America great. It’s what has allowed us to do bold things (read Felix Rohatyn’s “Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now”). It’s how we defeated the Royal Navy at Yorktown, ended slavery, built a transcontinental railroad, beat the Nazis, rebuilt Europe after World War II — and went to the moon.
Today’s Americans — besieged by crises from 9/11 to the 2008 economic meltdown and the COVID-19 pandemic — are searching for this sense of optimism.
The problem is they’re not finding it in their leaders, as Trump’s dark, vengeful rhetoric fills the airwaves and Democrats struggle to break into news coverage. But there is a way forward to be found in the words Kennedy spoke 63 years ago.
Whichever Democratic presidential candidate can summon that vision, that practical galvanizing of the American spirit into a new and shared national purpose, will win not only the next election but possibly the future as well.
Steve Israel represented New York in the House of Representatives for eight terms and was chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from 2011 to 2015.