The least salubrious aspect of the American character is the susceptibility to self-deception. We mythologize ourselves as clear-eyed dwellers of a shining city on a hill, but the fact is: we can’t handle the truth. Because we cannot make peace with our eroding stat­us as the world’s sole remaining superpower—one whose economic dominance is now far from unrivaled in an age of globalization—we retreat to cherished notions of American exceptionalism and ignore all the ways, from educational achievement to social well-being to wise stewardship of resources, in which we are not so super at all. We fight two far-flung wars while, for the first time in history, cutting taxes in the same breath, and then wonder why we’re having a rough go of it. We know at some level that our deficit is unsustainable but can’t agree on what is abundantly clear: that reducing it requires some combination of budget cuts and greater revenues. Meanwhile, the planet is lashed by extreme weather events of singular ferocity (including one that left parts of Washington, D.C., itself blacked out for nearly a week this summer), and yet we debate climate change as if it were a contested theory.

It goes on. Because white births are no longer the majority in a citizenry with deep Anglo-Saxon roots, and because many Americans recoil from this reality, we resist any sensible solution to the problem of the roughly 12 million illegal immigrants living among us and instead build high-tech barriers in a futile effort to stem the flow. Indeed, we are further away from any such solution than we were just six or eight years ago, when George W. Bush and some of his more enlightened Republican allies tried to think seriously about the question but were shot down by conservatives in their own party. The advent of Barack Obama has meant that alarming numbers among us cling not just to God and guns (as Obama once infelicitously put it) but to the conviction that the president must be a foreigner or a Marxist or a Muslim or even the Antichrist, and not merely cool, cerebral, and—oh, yes—black. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life found that the percentage of conservative Republicans who think Obama is a Muslim has more than doubled over the past four years, from 16 percent in 2008 to 34 percent now.

Why can’t we face up to reality? Americans have never been very good at acknowledging what is brutally obvious, or in thinking ourselves out of a jam before the jam in fact materializes. It took the Civil War, which killed about 2.5 percent of the population (the equivalent of more than 7 million people today), to resolve the conflict over slavery that had been embedded in the Constitution itself—this after decades of hopeless compromises and odious rationalizing. It took our entry into World War II, after the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, to push government spending and investment to levels that finally, and unwittingly, brought an end to the Depression. A principal legacy of the war was America’s emergence as a muscle-bound actor on the world stage—and we have yet to encounter a force powerful enough to make us dial back on our self-image as the world’s beat cop, even though the cost of the stat­us quo has proved ruinous.