Michael Barone, writing in the National Review Online, has a nice article which summarizes data from a Pew Global Attitudes survey. His conclusion: Americans are pessimistic about the future but shouldn't be. If you'd like to be cheered up, give him a read. I think he has misread the situation.
I suspect we are pessimistic about America's future because it appears that our political apparatus has become almost entirely dysfunctional. Legislatures don't legislate, leaders don't lead, and courts make wrong-headed decisions. Because our politics is so painful, we do not attract high quality individuals to public life. We see a threat from militant Islam and declare it to be a "religion of peace." We are overwhelmed by illegal immigrants, Latin America dumping its surplus population on us, and cannot muster the will to make it stop. We are dependent on foreign oil from nations that hate us and cannot bring ourselves to achieve energy independence. We refuse to give money to political campaigns and wonder why our politicians are owned by those who pay the bills. At the moment our public culture isn't behaving like something in which one can reasonably have confidence.
On the other hand, many of us have managed to carve out a quite reasonable life for ourselves in our slowly sinking Titanic of a nation. We have summer houses, take cruises and fly here and there for work and play. There are 200 channels on the TV, games on the computer, and this medium, the Internet, to entertain us. We eat too much fast food (bread) and watch the NFL on TV (circuses). Life is good for now, and possibly for our lifetimes. Yet we feel that it cannot be sustained through our children's and grandchildren's lifetimes.
I find the data that puzzles Barone extremely understandable, see if you don't agree. Yet the economic good news that he cites is real, a probable consequence of tax cuts. One interpretation is that governmental ineptitude is for the moment a boon in disguise. A government that can do nothing is a government that does little harm. Let's hope we don't suddenly need it to function in an emergency like Hurricane Katrina or worse.
