What would you say is the biggest problem facing our country? Now, if you said, “Donald Trump,” I wouldn’t necessarily disagree, but that’s not the kind of answer we’re looking for here. Hold that thought, though: you may be onto something.
What prompts my question is a report last week from Gallup, the polling organization, which has been asking Americans for 90 years what they consider the nation’s leading problem. Back in 1935, as people were struggling through the Great Depression and as President Roosevelt was pushing a massive federal investment to bring down the 20 percent jobless rate, the top two answers came back: “Unemployment” and “Budget and the National Debt.”
Next, by the way, people told Gallup 90 years ago that “keeping out of war” was important. Remember, Europe was already abuzz then about the potential threat of Adolf Hitler’s rise in Germany. And then came two economic issues: “Taxes” and the “Depression and economic recovery.”
Now, nine decades later, here’s what Americans say are the most pressing two issues facing the country: “Government and politics” topped the list as our Number one problem, followed by “Immigration” in the second slot. And after that, on the end-of-2025 list of concerns, were two economic categories – the “economy in general” and the “cost of living and inflation.” And then this, at Number 5: “National disunity.”
I’ve got to say that I’m worried about this list of what worries us. It ought to concern us that the nation’s top concern is what ought to be the solution to its problems, not a problem itself – namely, our government, which we empower to fix what worries us. And if “national disunity” is genuinely a major issue, it suggests we won’t be able to agree on how that Problem Number One, government, might be addressed.
By the way, the notion that “immigration” is the second most pressing issue facing the nation suggests to me a gross distortion of what ought to worry us. Almost everybody hearing or reading this commentary, after all, is a descendent of an American immigrant. Our ancestors weren’t as problematic in their generations as was America’s recurrent hostility to newcomers, and its xenophobia. I’d say that’s true now, too, though Fox News and its ilk have obviously done a great job of persuading people to buy Donald Trump’s view of the threat facing white, Christian America. Masked troops seizing people off the streets because they look “foreign” – which our Supreme Court has explicitly authorized, shamefully – ought to worry us more.
But we are where we are today, I’d say, because we’ve cared about the wrong things for too long. At some point we began to prefer fighting over our differences than solving them, and we stopped caring enough about our political system to vote for people who wanted to make it work. Instead we settled for the easy claim that government is the problem. Solutions are harder, you know. We went along with people who wanted to tear things down rather than fix them up. Donald Trump is the ultimate expression of that kind of a politician: He is a destructor.
So, yes, we made government and politics our top problem. Influenced by a media ecosystem that rewards distraction over information; manipulated in elections by a small group of extraordinarily rich power players; ill-served by politicians who choose power and partisanship over patriotism, we have disempowered the solution machine – that is, the functioning political system.
But we just can’t let that be our final answer. In 2026, the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, we have a chance to begin to revitalize our democracy. We can start to make government and politics not our main problem, but the vehicle for our improvement, as our nation’s founders imagined it would be. We can do that by supporting a sort of mass uprising to take back the initiative. It’s an election year, after all, and a time of disruption in the media. Imagine what could happen if tens of millions of us insist on policies that address real concerns, reward candidates who offer solutions over slogans, support journalism that addresses issues over images.
So then where might we be a year from now when we are asked about the biggest problem facing our country? Maybe we will have turned the corner toward truly making government once again a solver of problems rather than a creator of them. That’s something to set our sights on as we begin this 250th year of these United States.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
