Is it bad to be Pollyannish about one’s country?
I’ve blasted commentators before for living in a Disneyfied America, a Main Street where the music never stops and the shadows never show. For those whose privilege lets them turn off the darkness, it’s easy to bask in the klieg lights and call it patriotism. But I keep circling back to whether there’s something redeemable in that Pollyanna glow.
Maybe it isn’t all delusion.
Maybe it’s survival.
Being Black in America means living with haunted rooms and radiant vistas. You see a nation that some people will never admit exists because they were never forced into its segregated corridors, never branded by its systemic dehumanization, never pushed aside by its policy violence. And yet, in that same America, there’s a Black middle class, even a thin wealth class, with networks and capital that people in so-called dominant groups sometimes can’t access. The paradox is rich: advantages built atop disadvantages, beauty perched on brutality. That duality gives meaning to the larger tornado of human idiosyncrasies, but it also inoculates you against living in a false state of being. You can’t buy the glossy brochure version of America when you’ve seen the back room where the ink is mixed.
In graduate school, I studied propaganda in American political media, and I watched the center-right coalition that shaped my lifetime unravel. Many of its voices tried to treat the current era as a mere aberration, an accidental fever. But the mental gymnastics only revealed how unwilling they were to admit the obvious: this might have been the natural path all along. The failure to confront America’s racial divide, and treating it as incidental rather than foundational, created the illusion that conservatism could hum along untouched by that legacy.
History laughed.
You can split hairs over policy conservatism, cultural revanchism, and pure social animus. But conservatism’s weak spot has always been its easy capture by those who want to preserve hierarchy rather than wrestle with preserving institutions. The carnival tent remained standing for decades by sending two distinct messages to two different audiences: one respectable, one grotesque.
Eventually, the mask slipped, and now the grotesque runs the midway.
For marginalized groups, those who are Black, queer, immigrant, and women whose lives are cross-cut by race and class, none of this is surprising. America isn’t broken. It’s working as designed. Real history, not Pollyanna, supports that observation. Yet survival has always required hope. That’s where the rose-tinted goggles come in. People who grew up in the Reagan glow were given permission to believe in the good, or simply lacked the equipment to see the shadows. Their resistance to the MAGA takeover isn’t always about ignorance of the movement’s ugly side because many knew it existed. It’s that they carried a stubborn hope that the so-called adults in the room would keep the country from plunging deeper. To those who’ve seen the machinery up close, that optimism can feel painfully naïve. However, it’s also part of a larger human tradition: states are cruel and imperfect, yet people cling to the belief that they can be improved.
Nation-states are organisms that stumble forward, cracking bones as they grow, forgetting promises they swore they’d keep. Hope is not a cure, but it’s a strategy for enduring.
Can I, with my lived experience, fully understand the Pollyanna speckle?
Not really.
But I can recognize its role.
It is how people convince themselves tomorrow might be different, how pundits in the wreckage of their centrist dreams keep writing columns as if words alone can bend steel.
That center-right coalition, and its center-left enablers, now live with the hangover of deregulation, privatization, and bigoted rhetoric that wasn’t a glitch but a feature. Some of its veterans still want to believe they can rebuild the bipartisan tent of their youth. However, history doesn’t work that way. We are living through a digital Gilded Age, an echo of older inequalities dressed up in high-speed spectacle. The masks are off, the ghosts are back, and Bill Murray and his crew never had a chance of trapping them.
I don’t pretend to have a grand answer here. America has always demanded that some people believe the brochure while others live by the footnotes. History keeps happening, relentless and unsentimental, and we can’t press pause. But we can choose how to watch. We can stay informed, hold our loved ones close, and refuse to let the klieg lights blind us.
Maybe Pollyanna isn’t dangerous so long as it fuels the urge to find solutions.
Perhaps the danger lies only in confusing her glow with truth itself.
