The American 21st Century

[Geee]

National Review:


The current debt, recession, wars, and political infighting have depressed Americans into thinking their country soon will be overtaken by more vigorous rivals abroad. Yet this is an American fear as old as it is improbable.

In the 1930s, the Great Depression supposedly marked the end of freewheeling American capitalism. The 1950s were caricatured as a period of mindless American conformity, McCarthyism, and obsequious company men.


By the late 1960s, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., along with the Vietnam War, had fueled a hippie counterculture that purportedly was going to replace a toxic American establishment. In the 1970s, oil shocks, gas lines, Watergate, and new rustbelts were said to be symptomatic of a post-industrial, has-been America.
At the same time, other nations, we were typically told, were doing far better.

In the late 1940s, with the rise of a postwar Soviet Union that had crushed Hitler’s Wehrmacht on the eastern front during World War II, Communism promised a New Man as it swept through Eastern Europe.

[nickydog]

Oh yay -- VDH at his best, and a positive outlook with which to start the day, and a new year.

[Chickadee]

Oh yay -- VDH at his best, and a positive outlook with which to start the day, and a new year.

Boy, nickydog, I certainly second that! Talk about gravitas and using an exceptional vocabulary. There is just no doubt, Victor Davis Hanson is my favorite columnist.

 

Today's Regan-like reminder of the greatness, uniqueness and perseverance, of these United States is just the right note to strike as we begin a new year. We all need to shout this message from the rooftops!

[righteousmomma]

True - and I hate to be a Downer Betty" or whoever that is - but I was just going to post before I saw Nickydog and Chickadee's comments:

 

I LOVE VDH and usually agree with him almost totally but some things in this article kinds nag at me:

two factors are constant over the decades. First, America goes through periodic bouts of neurotic self-doubt, only to wake up and snap out of it. Indeed, indebted Americans are already bracing for fiscal restraint and parsimony as an antidote to past profligacy.

 

Second, decline is relative and does not occur in a vacuum.

 

True dat -but in the past we have not had the ever growing postmodern America and postmodern Christian perspectives as world views of a majority of the populace. For whatever reasons we have declined as a Nation in thought, word and deed. We have raised a generation whose goal is to be happy and do what feels good.

In short, a nation’s health is gauged not by bouts of recession and self-doubt, but by the durability of its political, economic, military, and social foundations. A temporarily ill-seeming America is nevertheless still growing, stable, multiethnic, transparent, individualistic, self-critical, and meritocratic; almost all of its apparently healthy rivals, by contrast, are not.

 

 

 

I pray with every ounce of my being that VDH is right...