The Case for Optimism

[Valin]

Commentary/Contentions:

John Podhoretz
November 2011
This article is from our special November issue, which focuses on the future of America. Also in the issue is Mark Steyn’s Case for Pessimism and a COMMENTARY symposium featuring 41 American thinkers and writers who answer the question: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America’s future? We will be posting two symposium contributions daily on our blog. Click here to read the most recently posted symposium contribution.

There is a growing propensity to place the blame for the disastrous fiscal and economic condition of the United States on the supposedly damaged spiritual condition of the American people. President Obama himself, inclined these days to blame the nation’s economic woes on his predecessor and on millionaires and billionaires, stepped on his own storyline recently when he told a Florida TV reporter that the American people had “gotten a little soft.” By saying this, he was echoing the view that something had gone wrong inside the body politic over the past decade or longer. The American people wanted benefits they didn’t want to pay for; they borrowed money they didn’t have; they refused to make tough choices. “The richest society the world has ever seen has grown rich by devising better and better ways to give people what they want,” Michael Lewis, the most influential financial journalist in America, writes in his new book Boomerang. “The boom in trading activity in individual stock portfolios; the spread of legalized gambling; the rise of drug and alcohol addiction—it is all of a piece.”

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It is a powerful argument. But it is wrong. And by understanding the ways in which it is wrong, we can see the contours of the case for optimism about the American future taking shape. Americans made entirely rational choices in the years leading up to the crisis in 2008; they responded properly to a series of incentives created over the preceding decades by politicians who meant well but were satisfying the interests not of the public as a whole but of constituent groups that stood to benefit far more than the ordinary voter from the creation of those incentives. Just as Americans responded to the realities of the time before the crisis, they will respond to the realities of the United States in which we now live. And the nation will come out the stronger for it.

(Snip)

The battles over all this will, to some extent, dominate our politics henceforward. We got a glimpse of the nature of the fight over the debt ceiling in July, and the 2012 election will pivot on it. I say “to some extent” because unexpected events, probably in the realm of foreign policy, will surely come along to complicate the picture. But when it comes to matters of their own fiscal health and the country’s, we can be confident in this: the American people have made rational choices in the past, and there is no reason to believe they will cease making rational choices in the future. And you don’t have to be all that much of an optimist to see that the choice between national suicide and national salvation isn’t really all that difficult.

[Valin]

Optimistic or Pessimistic About America

Hugh Hewitt

 

Our abundant national energy, unrivaled technological genius, and history’s most powerful military ought to leave me and everyone else an optimist about our country’s future.

 

There is simply no better place or time to live than America at the end of 2011, even with the most incompetent president since the discovery of electricity, even after a horrific decade of tears and sacrifices made by the innocent at home and the best and brightest of America on battlefields across the world.

 

The widespread tentativeness, the gnawing doubt felt by all parents and grandparents, is due to government never having been this large, with burdens so sclerosis-inducing in all aspects of national life.

 

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