Politicians Often Warn Of American Decline – And Voters Often Buy It

BY JONATHAN SCHULMAN

Presidential candidates talk about national decline while campaigning. A lot. This was front and center during the June 2024 debate between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden.

“Throughout the entire world, we’re no longer respected as a country,” Trump said, as he has repeatedly.

Trump continued by saying that if the United States had a president that Vladimir Putin respected, “he would have never invaded Ukraine.” Trump said “we’re laughed at” and that “the United States’ reputation under this man’s leadership is horrible.”

Biden countered Trump’s evocative statement with the argument that the U.S. has “the finest military in the history of the world” and that it remains well respected abroad.

“The idea that somehow we are this failing country,” Biden said, “I never heard a president talk like this before.”

Public polls on other countries’ views of the U.S. support Biden’s point.

Yet politicians’ warnings of decline persist because they invoke fear for the country’s security, anxiety about another country gaining more power and anger about the United States’ various problems.

Messages of decline over the years

While Trump’s messages of American carnage are dramatic, exchanges of this sort are not uncommon in U.S. politics.

During the 1960 presidential election, for example, John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, frequently warned that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union, in everything from space exploration to international respect.

“I don’t want historians, 10 years from now, to say these were the years when the tide ran out for the United States,” Kennedy said during his first televised debate against his Republican opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, on Sept. 26, 1960.

Warning of national decline has remained a common campaign message ever since, with the challenging party’s side claiming that the country is falling behind or losing respect, forcing the incumbent’s side to play defense.

Pushing back on messages of decline

My research examines the role of perceived threats to national status in domestic and international politics. I ran an experiment in March 2024 with 1,079 Americans, aimed at trying to understand how their concerns about national decline affect their foreign policy opinions.

One-third of respondents were randomly assigned to read a prompt warning that experts and leaders from both parties agreed that the U.S. was declining, relative to its rivals. Another third of respondents read the opposite message, which listed facts from bipartisan experts arguing that concerns about national decline were overblown. The final third read about a topic unrelated to politics.

Those who read about American decline reported increased levels of fear, anger and anxiety than the group who did not read about this topic. One respondent, for example, wrote, “My biggest concern is other countries won’t respect us. Once we show weakness, other countries will try to overtake us.”

However, the text of bipartisan experts arguing that the U.S. was not declining did not assuage Americans’ anxieties.

Approximately 30% of people, both liberal and conservative, who read that experts said the concerns over national decline are overblown outright rejected the premise of the text, compared with just 11% of those who read that U.S. global standing is declining.

Some respondents asked if the text was a joke and said that the U.S. is becoming a “third-world country.” Others pointed to the state of U.S. health care or reproductive rights to question how one could suggest that the country is not falling behind.

Fighting emotion with emotion

When the Democratic ticket changed and Biden announced in July 2024 that he would not run for reelection, the political messaging of Democratic leaders did, too.

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, have, at times, incited fear about what a second Trump term would look like. But they have also used language and talked about topics that center on joy and excitement, celebrating things like Walz’s tenure as a teacher and football coach and the pride Harris has for her mother’s work and sacrifices.

“Guided by optimism and faith,” Harris said in her nomination speech in August 2024, she encouraged her supporters to “write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.”

Harris has also provided an emotionally powerful counter to Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” in the form of “Not Going Back.”

In Walz’s first appearance as the Democratic candidate for vice president on Aug. 6, he thanked Harris for “bringing back the joy.” With rallies filled with boisterous call-and-responses and chanting, Harris has seized on joy and excitement in detailing a vision of America’s future, juxtaposing her rallies with what she described as Trump’s “the-world-is-doomed rallies.”

The subtitle of one Harris campaign press release following a Trump news conference, for example, read: “Split Screen: Joy and Freedom vs. Whatever the Hell That Was.”

US global standing in 2024 campaign

While Harris’ rallies have largely focused on domestic issues like abortion rights and economic inequality, debates over the country’s global standing will reemerge and persist. In an August 2024 poll, the second-most-common reason likely Harris voters said they supported her was because she would strengthen the United States’ status in the world – while the second-most-common reason other voters opposed her was because they thought she would weaken the country on the global stage.

Trump has continued to describe the U.S. as a “nation in decline.” Harris, in her Democratic National Convention speech, countered that she will work to ensure that “America, not China, wins the competition for the 21st century and that we strengthen, not abdicate, our global leadership.”

Harris also remarked in her acceptance speech: “You know, our opponents in this race are out there every day denigrating America, talking about how terrible everything is. Well, my mother had another lesson she used to teach: Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.”

Campaign rhetoric warning of American decline has been common since at least 1960, and it isn’t going away anytime soon. But with a new Democratic ticket and a transformed race, Democrats are now fighting emotion with emotion. And that is more likely to resonate than informing people that things are not as bad as they fear.

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