Dana Milbank on the death of American optimism

Dana Milbank has a column in the Washington Post about the death of American optimism about the future, based primarily on a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll of Americans.  "Thus, When asked if “life for our children’s generation will be better than it has been for us,” fully 76 percent said they do not have such confidence. Only 21 percent did. That was the worst ever recorded in the poll; in 2001, 49 percent were confident and 43 percent not.."   As one might expect given the percentages, pessimism cuts across class, racial, and ethnic lines, even if there are differences in the level of pessimism. " In other words, the gloom goes beyond wealth, gender, race, region, age and ideology. This fractious nation is united by one thing: lost faith in the United States."

What accounts for this?  There are, of course, many potential explanations, including the slow recovery from the Great Recession.  But Milbank writes at he shares the belief of Fred Yang, one of the pollsters, "that something deeper is also at work: Americans are reacting, in part, to the breakdown of the political system, which leaves people quite rationally worried about American decline and the nation’s diminishing ability to weather crises."  Needless to say, I agree, but, perhaps also needless to say, is that Milbank, like almost all of his fellow pundits, resolutely refuses to connect the dots between the "breakdown of the political system" and the constitutional order imposed on us by the 1787 Constitution, as insufficiently amended. So the question is how much longer can references to "the breakdown of the political system" avoid any mention of what in major ways constitutes the basics of that system, i.e., the Constitution? Or let me put it this way:  If I am correct that most readers of Balkinization (including lurkers) share the sense of pessimism--if they do not, that itself would be fascinating and worth independent study--how many of them believe that the Constitution will prove to be a net positive force in making things better over the next, say, two decades, as against a cause of further despair?  It is possible, of course, that one could rationally believe that the Constitution makes no difference at all, one way or the other, that Marx (or anyone else you might put in his place) was right in viewing constitutions as merely epiphenomenal  on what is really important, whether it's the economy, stupid; our falling away from religion; the sheer force of globalization and the ever greater competition for limited resources, or what have you.  But that view, at least, means that we can stop praising the irrelevant Constitution, which would be an improvement over venerating it, at least as far as I am concerned.