Posted on 05/23/2007 9:30:13 PM PDT by Valin
The suicide-murders and roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan sicken Americans. Soon-to-be nuclear Iran seems loonier than nuclear North Korea. American debt keeps piling up in China and Japan. And we think of angry Venezuela, the Middle East and Russia every time we fill up - if we can afford to fill up.
Then listen to Al Gore on global warming. Or hear Jimmy Carter on the current president. The common denominator is American "decline."
Books by liberals assure us that our "empire" is kaput. Brace for the inevitable fate of Rome. Conservatives are just as glum. For them, we are also Romans - but the more decadent variety, eaten away from the inside.
In response, many bored Americans turn instead to the la-la land of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
Yet American Cassandras are old stuff. Grim Charles Lindberg in the late 1930s lectured a Depression-era America that Hitler's new order in Germany could only be appeased, never opposed.
After World War II, it wasn't long before the Soviet Union ended our short-lived status as sole nuclear superpower. And when Eastern Europe and China were lost to communism, it was proof, for many, that democratic capitalism was passé. "We will bury you," Nikita Khrushchev promised us.
After the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991, America proclaimed itself at the "end of history" - meaning that the spread of our style of democratic capitalism was now inevitable. Now a mere 16 years later, some are just as sure we approach our own end.
But our rivals are weaker and America is far stronger than many think.
Take oil. With oil prices at nearly $70 a barrel, Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez seem invincible as they rally anti-American feeling.
But if we find alternate energy sources, or reduce slightly our oil hunger, we can defang all three rather quickly. None of their countries have a middle class or a culture of entrepreneurship to discover and disseminate new knowledge.
Russia and Europe are shrinking. China is an aging nation of only children. The only thing the hard-working Chinese fear more than their bankrupt communist dictatorship is getting rid of it.
True, the economies of China and India have made amazing progress. But both have rocky rendezvous ahead with all the social and cultural problems that we long ago addressed in the 20th century.
And European elites can't blame their problems - a bullying Russia, Islamic terrorists, unassimilated minorities and high unemployment - all on George Bush's swagger and accent. The recent elections of Angela Merkel in Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy in France suggest that Europe's cheap anti-Americanism may be ending, and that our practices of more open markets, lower taxes and less state control are preferrable to the European status quo.
In truth, a never-stronger America is being tested as never before. The world is watching whether we win or lose in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Middle East is either going to reform or remain an oil-rich tribal mess that endangers the entire world.
A better way to assess our chances at maintaining our preeminence is simply to ask the same questions that are the historical barometers of our nation's success or failure: Does any nation have a constitution comparable to ours? Does merit - or religion, tribe or class - mostly gauge success or failure in America? What nation is as free, stable and transparent as the U.S.?
Try becoming a fully accepted citizen of China or Japan if you were not born Chinese or Japanese. Try running for national office in India from the lower caste. Try writing a critical op-ed in Russia or hiring a brilliant female to run a mosque, university or hospital in most of the Middle East. Ask where MRI scans, Wal-Mart, iPods, the Internet or F-18s came from.
In the last 60 years, we have been warned in succession that new paradigms in racially pure Germany, the Soviet workers' paradise, Japan Inc. and now 24/7 China all were about to displace the United States. None did. All have had relative moments of amazing success - but in the end none proved as resilient, flexible and adaptable as America.
That brings us to the United States' greatest strength: radical self-critique. We Americans are worrywarts, always believing we're on the verge of extinction. And so, to "renew," "reinvent" or "save" America, we whip ourselves up about "wars" on poverty, drugs and cancer; space "races;" missile "gaps;" literacy "crusades;" and "campaigns" against litter, waste and smoking.
In other words, we nail-biters have always been paranoid that we must change and improve in order to survive. And thus we usually do - just in time.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War."
PING!!!!
.
Or torn down!
It’s always Morning in America.
We twice the carrier groups needed to put down any two or three of the largest other nations. ...sky’s not falling on us. But there is a whole lot of fear going on with market people (especially those in import markets, what with prices probably going up for freight fuel, the dollar needing to go down to adjust against trade deficits, and the like).
Oops...have twice the carrier groups needed, even.
It’s always something. I don’t really worry about our future, I recall the late 70’s can you say MEOW?
Ahh...a pep talk I guess. I think we need one, and thanks VDH for that.
What’s really galling is the so-called liberals are frigging chameleons - 20, 30 or 50 years ago it was they who said “Don’t worry, you’re being paranoid, uptight and unrealistic about _______, it’ll be fine.” Now they want to “help” solve the impending myriad of societal train-wrecks in our midst and on the horizon. I think the parlor tricks are about played out however.
I’ll have to read this in the morning.
You realize that you are the 1st person in FreeRepublic history to do that! I should report you but for $20.00 I’ll forget I ever saw it.
http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=462341
Low-caste Indian woman takes power
14 May 2007
People of all castes have brought us to power
LUCKNOW, India - A low-caste woman has been sworn in as leader of India’s most populous state after sweeping to victory with a “rainbow” campaign which cut across social divides.
Former school teacher Mayawati Kumari and over a dozen members of her cabinet yesterday took the oath of office in Lucknow, capital of Uttar Pradesh state, after her party stunned rivals and defied exit polls.
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) captured 206 constituencies, giving Mayawati a narrow majority in the 403-seat state assembly - the first in 14 years of often unsteady coalition rule in the province of 170 million people where poverty and religious and caste violence are widespread.
Shekhar Gupta, editor of the Indian Express newspaper, said in a front-page column yesterday that Mayawati’s appeal cut across caste, religion and income.
He said voters clearly “want to move away from the politics of grievance to the politics of aspiration” and enjoy the fruits of India’s economic boom.
The result, bringing the fiery 51-year-old to her fourth stint as chief minister, followed marathon month-long polls staggered over seven rounds.
“People of all castes have brought us to power,” Mayawati told a news conference after her victory, as she thanked the upper castes and Muslims for spurning their traditional preferences.
The results showed that Mayawati’s BSP had cut significantly into the traditional support base of India’s main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose seat tally declined from 88 to 50.
The Congress, which rules at the national level, won 22 seats against the 25 it held previously, despite an aggressive campaign by the country’s most famous political dynasty, the Gandhis.
Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul, seen as the family’s political heir, along with her daughter Priyanka, all campaigned energetically in the state, which the party dominated until 1989.
“Both the parties need to do some serious introspection with the national elections due in 2009,” said political analyst Mahesh Rangarajan.
“Mayawati has stolen the ground from under the BJP’s feet by stitching up a formidable alliance of people from all castes and communities,” he said, referring to a shift of upper-caste votes from the BJP to BSP.
The charismatic leader was born into a “Chamar” or leatherworkers’ family - at the bottom of India’s rigid caste hierarchy - on the outskirts of New Delhi.
She first became chief minister of sprawling Uttar Pradesh in 1995, when she was India’s first woman Dalit or “untouchable” state chief.
Although her first term lasted less than six months, “behenji” or “sister” as she is respectfully called, became an instant icon for millions of India’s oppressed and marginalised.
Sapa-AFP
The only thing I see falling in America is the approval rating of congress.
What was it that happened to Sodom/Gomorrah...?
“But if we find alternate energy sources, or reduce slightly our oil hunger...”
We have natural resources up the whazoo. Alaska - oil, for example. And the last time I checked, Teddy Kennedy didn’t want his view obstructed by those horrendous looking wind turbines. We got nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, tidal, geothermal power, just to name a few.
Now if the anti-American environmentalists and animal “rights” activists can get our of the way, we Americans can continue to blaze trails that foreigners are dying to benefit from.
But....but....that can't happen to us. We are the USA. We are the biggest, best, wealthiest, most powerful country in the world, and we don't need God. < / sarc >
IF God didn't punish the US, He'd have to go back and apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah! It's pretty obvious why America's going down.
A MUST-READ.
But trust not in chariots or Mammon (money/commerce). Trust in God.
America, are you listening?
VDH talks in very broad terms, but there is little doubt that the lower 80% of Americans, income wise, will be tested onec again as the US dollar is continuously devaluated to try to correct high level fiscal imbalances.
Approximately every 4th or 5th breadwinner in the third world to reach the middle class locally equals the consumption level of 1 lower class American breadwinner. The the increases in increased demand is unending, the supply of developing world people wiling to work hard to reach the middle class is unending. Americans will have a harder time maintaining lifestyles that reach our current consumption levels in the years to come.
Alexander’s Macedonians stayed in the mountains to maintain a strong societal fortitude, Americans have spread out across this vast continent and migrated towards the most fruitful locations possible, weakening our fortitude in some ways.
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