Despite so many auspicious indicators, the America depicted in political and intellectual debate is invariably a place we should be building starships to flee. To the left, the United States remains a land of racial repression, corporate oligarchy, and environmental decay to the right, a country where all things pure are collapsing. Such views hold considerable sway. Whitman's The Optimism Gap reports that 1996 polls showed that only 15 percent of Americans believe the country is getting better. In similar polls, about half said the nation is worse off compared to how it was when their parents were growing up, and 60 percent believed the United States in which their children dwell will be worse still. Though most Americans are today healthier, better housed, better fed, better paid, better educated, better defended, more free, and diverted by a cornucopia of new entertainment products and services, somehow they've managed to convince themselves their parents had it better during the Dust Bowl. As Robert Samuelson noted in his skillful book, the revolution of rising expectations has taken on a life of its own: 'There can never be enough prosperity.' Polls now suggest that, regardless of how much money an American has, he or she believes that twice as much is required. Samuelson further contends that one reason for all the unfocused anxiety is that the media have gotten so much better at emphasizing things to worry about. Tropical storms that might hit the United States get more network coverage than any favorable turn of events. Television crime coverage, especially, now seems itched to cause civic fright, while movies and network entertainment programming depict violence as far more pervasive than it actually is. As Christopher Jencks, a professor of government at Harvard University. Notes: 'When I was growing up there was violence on TV, but it was cowboys having shootouts. I never worried that rustlers world come over the hill into my neighborhood. Now the violence on television is presented as if it's about to get you personally. Every screen you look, at home or in theaters, has something disastrous on it. No wonder people think the country is out of control.' Conservative thinkers and politicians seem distressed by the contemporary milieu in part because Americans are more or less willingly adopting gender equality and cultural openness, including a culture in which minority writing and art are being admitted to the canon. The political and academic left can't stand the contemporary milieu in part because class war, economic breakdown, and environmental calamity seem less and less likely. 'The left elites talk with obsessive negativism about the religious right because it's one of the few things they can find to still get upset about,' notes Orlando Patterson of Harvard. 'The right elite is similarly obsessive about the supposed culture war, when all the evidence is that the United States is becoming ever more tolerant and ever more at peace with diversity.' The sentence 'Such views hold considerable sway' implies that ______.