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With their huge capacities and national sense of uniqueness, with their long isolation from other cultures across the oceans, Americans also worked well at becoming almost as good as they said they were. America became a miracle of sheer energy and wealth and life: an incandescence, a genetic wonderworks that the Old World stared at in astonishment. The spectacle of such opportunity got the immigrant adrenaline going. New Americans rose to the occasion more often than revisionist history is inclined to admit. The melting pot functioned better than the current assumption of ethnic conflict supposes. Whatever the economic trammels, the U.S. progressively developed a social mobility, a standard of living and individual freedom that no other society had ever offered.
Americans saw their lives as an upward march toward the light. Or, as Columbia University Historian Henry Graff says, "they pictured America riding a train going up a mountain. It went round and round, but always onward and upward. The only interruptions were occasional tunnels—wars and depressions. It would suddenly go dark and then the light would stream in again, and we'd be on our way."
Progress made the American idea work; progress validated the dream—a kind of secular redemption, profligate with promises, the hot gospel of better days unfolding. Progress was the indispensable mechanism and metaphysic of the American idea: the pioneer progression westward over space corresponded with the steady upward incline of opportunity over time. "You can't stop progress," Americans would tell one another with an air of dazzled exuberance or a rueful sigh. The future was bearing down on the land like a grinning child at the wheel of something roaring, gaudily bright and faintly dangerous.
Today a kind of millennial chill has settled upon whole sectors of the American psyche that once could not wait to get up in the morning. Progress has collided with the philosophy of limits. Of all cultural adjustments, the notion of an end to progress seems the most difficult for Americans to accept. It is foolish that a general cultural drift makes them feel that they must.
Americans are now defensively aware of their history: they are in transit from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican view of themselves, and a scaling down of their range and ambitions in the world. The diminution, even the implicit insult of the process, is painful. It prompts some insistent revisions in the creed. Where once equality of opportunity was enough (there seemed an immense river to drink from, why give out numbers?), the continent is sufficiently depleted to start a crisis in political philosophy. Who gets what? And why? Equality of opportunity competes with equality of result. Where once the able simply grazed upon the American economy, questions of access and entitlement cast doubt on the old rules.
The argument bruises old myths. In the crueler interpretation of the American idea, anyone who failed was more or less meant to fail. That logic may, more than any other single factor, explain the tragedy of race in America.