Meaning in Decline

For much of the history of the United States, Europeans have stereotyped Americans as being annoyingly optimistic. Americans described their new era of democracy as a novus ordo seclorum—a new order for the ages—as the US one-dollar bill states. When he visited the United States in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by how Americans “have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man. . . . They admit that what appears to them to be good to-day may be superseded by something better to-morrow.” A century later, the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair offered exhibits like Homes of Tomorrow that cast a vision for an art deco future built with prefabricated materials and equipped with personal helicopter pads.

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