ML-Implode News - Lost in America

Conventional wisdom has seldom been so useless, because pessimism in this country isn't usually this durable or profound... Much of this was chillingly captured by a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from early August that got lost somewhat amid the recent deluge of awful news but deserved closer attention. It included the jolting finding that 76 percent of Americans ages 18 and older weren't confident that their children's generation would fare better than their own. That's a blunt repudiation of the very idea of America, of what the "land of opportunity" is supposed to be about. For most voters, the national narrative is no longer plausible.
The poll also showed that 71 percent thought that the country was on the wrong track. While that represents a spike, it also affirms a negative mind-set that's been fixed for a scarily long time. As the Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik has repeatedly noted, more Americans have been saying "wrong track" than "right track" for at least a decade now, and something's got to give.
...
The new jobs don't feel as sturdy as the old ones. It takes more hours to make the same money or support the same lifestyle. Students amass debt. Upward mobility increasingly seems a mirage, a myth.
... this isn't just about the economy. It's about fear. It's about impotence. We can't calm the world in the way we'd like to, can't find common ground and peace at home, can't pass needed laws, can't build necessary infrastructure, can't, can't, can't.

In the Journal/NBC poll, 60 percent of Americans said that we were a nation in decline. How sad. Sadder still was this: Nowhere in the survey was there any indication that they saw a method or a messenger poised to arrest it.

Relevant:

Lost in America - Frank Bruni