You can list a bunch of things, but that's not really measurable and doesn't list the millions of data points that go into a country's well-being. You can look

You can list a bunch of things, but that's not really measurable and doesn't list the millions of data points that go into a country's well-being. You can look at Jan 6 as a disaster or you can look and say it failed, many of the perpetrators are going to jail and the next election cycle went off without a hitch. You can't stop people from being nuts, but honestly this speaks volumes to the incredible resiliency and durability of our institutions. Similarly, you can look at the economic disasters of the past 20 years as disasters, but you can also look back and say that despite constant doomsaying we never got within a country mile of an actual collapse. Nobody starved, poverty actually decreased during the pandemic despite the deepest economic shock in our history. Again, our institutions did an absolutely phenomenal job of backstopping disaster. Our engagement in Ukraine is hardly our doing. Russia committed massive aggression against a weaker neighbor and America rallied support with impeccable timing to turn the tide without having the fighting spread. You can't prevent bad things from happening, but we've been able to handle the worst of it with aplomb. And speaking of South America and the Middle East, that's now mostly in the past. To the author's point, the shit we did in the 70s was way worse than now. The shit we did in the 30s was worse than the 70s. You don't have to go back very far to see almost everything being worse than now. So the point isn't so much "Everything is Great" as much "(Almost) Everything is as good or better than it ever was despite not being so great". The assertion is very much that we have a long ways to go, but are absolutely moving in the right direction and pretty consistently so at that.