If they gave awards for slogans, “Make America Great Again” easily would win the prize for the first quarter of the 20th century. Donald Trump rode it to the presidency in 2016, may do it a second time in 2024, and all things MAGA have become part of pop culture.
This leads to a natural question: When was America last great? It’s a hard one to answer, but The Washington Post website’s Department of Data recently dug into the topic and found a good answer to the issue of greatness.
It cited a recent survey from YouGov, which took an online poll of 2,000 adults to ask which decades were the best for many different things: the economy, movies, TV, music and sporting events, for starters. It also addressed more weighty topics like when the country had the happiest families, the most close-knit communities, the least amount of war, the best work-life balance, the most moral society, the least political division and the most reliable news reporting.
There was no consistent pattern to the answers. The 1980s and 1990s won for best economy, with the 1950s and 2010s close behind.
The 1980s, 1990s and 2000s had the best movies. But the current-day 2020s won for best TV; the 1980s and 1990s were runner-ups.
The 1950s won by wide margins for happiest families and most close-knit communities. Respondents said the 1980s had the least amount of war, while the current decade has the best work-life balance.
The 1950s also won the most moral society poll, while the 1980s had the least political division and the 1970s had the most reliable news reporting. Nice job, Walter Cronkite.
However, the poll did identify when more Americans believed things were best.
“The good old days when America was great aren’t the 1950s,” the story said. “They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.”
There is an awful lot of truth to that. One of the charts with the story compared respondents’ choice for their favorite decade for a particular topic with the year they were born. Without exception, the most frequent answer was within two decades of the respondents’ birth. This was true for weighty issues like the most moral society and the least political division, and for cultural issues like the best movies and music.
The poll also asked people when they thought things were the worst in America, and for many topics, a large number, often between 30% and 60%, said it’s right now.
This is a great example of how some people are never satisfied. More than 30% of those polled said today’s economy is the worst one ever, going all the way back to the 1930s. However, the economy was clearly worse during the ’30s — remember that little thing called the Great Depression? By no standard is today’s economy worse than that.
The political opinions of respondents appear to play a role. Republicans polled in the University of Michigan’s consumer survey were very bullish for most of Trump’s term, turning downward when covid-19 arrived in 2020 and getting even more negative with Joe Biden became president. Democrats were blah during the Trump years but are more optimistic now.
So, when was America last great? The honest answer may be, “It depends on when you were born.” If the YouGov poll is accurate, just take your birth year, add 10 or 20 years to it and see if you have good feelings about that period.
Jack Ryan, Enterprise-Journal
