We can’t seem to do anything at all any more. Here are two posts about that: one from Walter Russell Mead, the other from Dennis Mangan.
Democracy works well enough for a while, I suppose, while a nation is young and virile enough to value opportunity over security, and while its people can muster up enough self-confidence, social cohesion and unity of purpose to agree upon national goals, and to make a serious effort to achieve them.
We are not such a nation any more — lean, athletic, vigorous and hungry. No, we are now in late middle age: weary, obese, weakened by cultural self-doubt and existential guilt, too fond of comfort, too wary of risk, exhausted by corrosive metabolic disease and the collapse of our immune system, sapped by parasites, and all but immobilized by all the clutter we’ve created and accumulated. We can hardly get off the couch even to look after our own most basic needs, and resent the idea that we should have to. We can hardly bear to look in the mirror.
What are the exceptions? They are to be found in small, agile, self-organizing entities that are lightweight enough, and focused enough, and cohesive enough, and intelligent enough, to move, to act, to create, to do. They must be nimble enough to live in the shadows of tottering behemoths without being trampled, or eaten — but the great, slow beasts are dying now; their time is nearly over.
When I visited Singularity University in April, one of the speakers (I think it was Paul Saffo) said that he thought that modern nation-states were becoming obsolete, and wouldn’t be around much longer. I can’t recall if he mentioned that this is particularly true of democracies, but to me it seems it must be. Will there still be a United States of America, as presently constituted, thirty years from now? How? Why?
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Since your questions, Malcolm, invite purely speculative answers, and, as a consequence, answers based on personal biases, opinions, and unsupported assertions, I’m sure we will get more than you bargained for from our resident gadfly, who, as we all know, is very full of himself, which is to say, indistinguishable from brown smelly stuff (but I mean that in a nice way).
Stand back, for it is bound to hit the fan at any moment …
Maybe so. The man is an incorrigible optimist. It’s actually one of his most endearing qualities.
It’s hard not to be full of oneself. No matter which way you turn, there you are…
Indeed. One is never completely lost — one is always “here”.
Being optimistic is not tantamount to being pollyannish. I think that in many ways America is fat, lazy, and contented. Things don’t work as well as they should. Government and politics are dysfunctional. I drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry.
However, while this end-of-the-world stuff sells a lot of books, the world doesn’t actually end all that often. While it is tempting to look at those halcyon days when America was young and robust, it’s also worth noting that in those days blacks were lynched, impoverished seniors lived on Alpo, and we all used black rotary telephones.
I also believe that while second- and third-generation Americans may spend an inordinate amount of time on the sofa watching televised sports and eating salty snacks, the phoenix-like resurrection of the American dream comes in the waves of immigrants who revitalize the culture and economy. I willingly concede that my context is Silicon Valley, where people come from all over the world to build the Next Great Thing. I’m just sayin’.
In other news: I would also point with pride to my fearless prediction back in March that the individual mandate would be upheld by the Court, with Roberts writing the majority opinion:
http://malcolmpollack.com/2012/03/27/our-day-in-court/#comments
Peter, you may go ahead and gloat (though I will point out that the Court rejected the Commerce Clause argument you thought would be the basis of the decision). Your prediction was correct.
Regarding immigration: if I understand you correctly, you are saying that the Americans who are already here — 311 million of them, with every imaginable skill and creative impulse — are somehow incapable of sustaining our national economy and culture, and that the only hope therefore lies in the mass importation of even more outsiders, at a time of disastrously high unemployment among those already here. Is that about right?
I don’t believe the world will end any time soon. But it is clear to me that it is getting uglier by the day. And I willingly concede that Obama and his supporters are the principal wielders of the ugly sticks.
Blacks not being lynched is a very good thing, no doubt. But Obama and his lackeys stoking racial tensions and character assassinations — not so much. Seniors eating Alpo — not good. Half the population eating government cheese — not much better. Sure, iPhones are swifter than black rotaries. Is Obama taking credit for that, too?
One can choose to be an optimist, especially if one has achieved a comfort level that affords one the leisure time to count one’s blessings, which I willingly admit to having reached myself. But to ignore the muck being introduced wholesale into our society by the likes of Obama, Pelosi, and their leftists-in-arms is irresponsible and willfully ignorant.
Not the end of the world, perhaps. But quite possibly a civil war. Because the left is that obnoxious.
I wouldn’t rule out a civil war, Henry, given how deep and wide the ideological fissure splitting America has become. I think it is more likely that the country will simply fall apart along ideological/ethnic lines, but if that proves to be intractably difficult, anything is possible.
I am not gloating at all. Nor will I gloat when Obama defeats Romney in November. Gloating is ungentlemanly. It is scant satisfaction to say “I told you so,” but great satisfaction to see things going on the right track for a change.
However, I will take a brief moment to dislocate my shoulder in patting myself on the back for uncanny prescience and foresight.
I’m guessing that in the horse trading which went on before the decision was announced, the four liberal justices agreed to Roberts’s argument that the mandate falls under Congress’s ability to tax, rather than the Commerce Clause, as a quid pro quo for his vote. What-ever. All’s well that ends well.
If the Court struck down Obamacare, it would have been the largest affront to a major piece of legislation since the “nine old men” struck down FDR’s recovery bills in the 1930’s. I didn’t think that Roberts wanted to go down that path, as he showed the proper deference to the other two branches of government and affirmed the traditional Court practice of respecting duly passed legislation absent egregious Constitutional issues.
There’s opportunity here folks, finally a chance to see TBH ‘n Peter arm-in-arm on something.
(Now me being the recognizer of this great idea – well we can get our compensation structure structured later – just like the Affordable Health Care thingy.)
T-Shirts. And Sharpie pens.
One the front, stencil “It’s Bush’s Fault.” On the reverse, place empty parentheses opening top left shoulder and closing somewhere oh, ’bout halfway down along the right side of the ribcage.
Advertise the T-shirts as being, “America’s Bipartisan Promise” or something similarly catchy.
Republicans use the Sharpie to write in, “For nominating our new Chief Justice.” And for the Democrats – well, “Fill In The Blank.”
We’ll make a killing.
Support for my enthusiasm for immigration can be seen in today’s Wall Street Journal.
The money line: “the world’s best, the world’s hardest-working and the world’s most ambitious are still coming our way.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303561504577494831767983326.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5
Anecdotal “support” for lame propositions is the first refuge of the arithmetically-challenged. Another example of mind-numbing stupidity, as when Obama proudly charged his Cabinet to diligently purge millions of wasted dollars from their budgets, which relative to trillion-dollar deficits amounts to jack.
Not only the best and brightest, perhaps.
But even if so — with 311 million of us already here, and unemployment at disastrously high levels, why on earth do we need mass immigration? Are we so incompetent at everything we want done around here that we have to import further millions of aliens to compete with Americans for whatever jobs are still available?
And more than that — with our social and cultural cohesion at an all-time low, why do we need even more fragmentation and Balkanization? Why should I cheer the accelerating displacement of America’s historical majority population, and the transformation of its homeland into a fractious multicultural and multiethnic hodgepodge?
Why have borders at all?
But we’ve been through this before, in excruciatingly tedious detail. Readers are invited to visit the comment thread here.
Let’s take me as an example.
I am a second generation American. My role model in life is Homer Simpson. My goals in life are to exceed him in size of brew-gut, paucity of work ethic, and all-around lack of moral fiber. Wouldn’t you want people like me to be balanced out by hard-working Koreans and Singaporeans?
Peggy Noonan hates hates hates President Obama. Her commentary uses the model pioneered by National Lampoon and adopted by Fox News (Obama foreign policy: threat or menace?). In a very curious piece today, she still slams Obamacare, but grudgingly praises the President. I was shocked.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303649504577494931074947726.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
Precisely my point: I would not. There is more to a nation than its economy. Asians — particularly North Asians — are generally responsible, hard-working people, with low crime rates, good economic instincts, and a higher average IQ than the white Europeans who constitute America’s historical majority. But I don’t reason from that to the conclusion that America’s traditional majority population — my own people! — should cheer on its displacement, in its own homeland, by Asians, any more than I would expect the Tibetans to be thrilled about their displacement by Han Chinese.
Moreover, what about the effect of mass Asian immigration on America’s other historical population: blacks? Let’s have no illusions about sweet harmony and effortless intermingling between those two groups.