Just like the Founding Fathers, we're out of sorts

Happy Birthday, America. We are 232 years old today.

As celebrations go, though, this one feels strained. Forced. It comes at a time when a lot of people are wondering: Do we even believe in America anymore?

I don't mean the founding idea — the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness part. That seems strong, if newly challenged by recalled meat and $100 gas fill-ups.

I mean the sentence after that in the Declaration of Independence. Where they say that to secure America's promise, "governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

This part of the democracy bargain, the institutional part, has gone sour. As sour as at any time in memory.

We are in a grand national funk. We are having, to borrow the infamous words of Jimmy Carter, a "crisis of confidence."

For 35 years the Gallup polling firm has asked how much trust we have in our institutions, from the presidency on down to yours truly, the press.

Two weeks ago, Gallup released this year's version. It is stunning how much we the people have lost faith.

Only 12 percent say they have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in Congress — the worst rating ever measured for any institution in the history of this poll.

The U.S. Supreme Court got its lowest rating ever. The presidency has scored its lowest the past two years.

What's striking is how much more skeptical we are now than even back in 1979, when then-president Carter gave his "national malaise" speech.

"I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy," he said. Creeping doubt, especially of a "system of government that seems incapable of action," was crippling the country, he said.

That was a gloomy time, with its gas shortages and double-digit inflation. Yet our views of almost every societal institution were far sunnier then than now.

Our confidence in banks is down 28 percent since 1979. Organized religion, down 17 percent. Public schools, down 20. Newspapers, down 11.

(One group is up — the military. Probably because it just works. It has a mission and it carries it out. The controversy is almost entirely in how we use the military, not in whether it is up to the job.)

I am not saying all these negative views mean we are a dysfunctional society. Or that people are miserable. Or that the end of the empire is nigh.

But we are a society that doesn't believe it is working. Some core faith between the people and the system we've set up to help bring us liberty and happiness has fractured.

Does that matter? Can we go swimmingly along, a nation of doubters still living the good life?

Carter argued we could not. He said faith in our grand experiment "is not simply some romantic dream, or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July." It is the sustaining force of the whole deal, of "public institutions and private enterprise, our own families and the very Constitution of the United States."

Of course he was booted out after one term. Partly because he was such a downer.

Still, this year I have talked to scores of voters — Obamaphiles, McCainiacs, Ronulans, Clintonites. Almost all expressed a sense that something big is teetering. Bigger even than war policy, or the economy, or the health-care system.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote recently: "I do not believe nation-building in Iraq is going to be the issue come November. I think nation-building in America is going to be the issue."

Nation-building? Are we so broken we need to start over?

The issue Carter was trying to get at in 1979 — the thing that really got him in political trouble — was: What if what's crumbling isn't just the institutions, but the spirit of the people themselves? The belief it takes to be "the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy?"

This faith has been frayed by decades of spin, lies and low expectations. I've heard it all my life in politics. Why get involved if it won't make any difference? Why bother if they're going to lie to us anyway?

The answer to all this can be found in the birthday document itself. A few years ago I was at a July 4th gathering on Lopez Island when an Episcopal priest, Murray Trelease, forced us to read, aloud, the entire Declaration of Independence.

Have you read it lately? Most of it is a long list of grievances. It's a bitch session for the ages!

Yet we all know the rest of that story. Somehow they harnessed those grievances, their "crisis of confidence," and came up with one of the great creations of all time. This country.

So now grievance is in America's air again. Will we wallow in it? Or turn it into good?

I feel more energy for the latter than at any time in my lifetime. Maybe not enough to really change things. But it's there. We just had the second-highest voter turnout ever for the primaries — 25 million more than in 2004. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton got more votes than anyone who has ever run for president.

The other day I was talking to a 31-year-old Mary Kay cosmetics saleswoman named Jean Avery, of Redmond. She believes there's such electricity about this election precisely because people are fed up.

She's never been active in politics before. She likes John McCain because she says he's honest. So she started a Web site from her living room, called Moms for McCain.

In three months it got visitors from all 50 states. When she went on vacation, she got e-mails wondering: "Are you OK? We need you."

I asked her whether she thinks our democracy is sick.

"If a housewife in Redmond can go from doing nothing to forming a community with people in 50 states, does that sound like there's a problem with democracy?" she asked.

The trick is to turn criticism into hope, she said.

"It's lighting a candle instead of cursing the darkness," she said.

That's what the patriots did, 232 years ago. They cursed the darkness. Then they lit enough candles to start a roaring fire.

So happy birthday, America.

Once the party's over, though, we have our own revolution to attend to.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.