I tend to agree, however, here’s where I think the point is accurate - we, as a nation, have lost our edge. We are no longer about excelling above and beyond limits and expectations. Our military has been made into a social experiment. Our schools no longer teach American exceptionalism and respect for the Founding Fathers. Our workers, instead of being grateful that they have jobs, look at their places of employement as slave camps where they are forced to toil away for nothing. We are now a country that celebrates laziness and rewards sloth. These kinds of things cannot go on for long before they have an effect on our collective psyche. I have had this thought more than once during this Olympics. How else do we go from 37 medals total in Vancouver to so few now? I know there are still some medals out there for us, but we’re going to be nowhere close to the Vancouver numbers (we’re 8 medals behind where we were then at the same point). Look at the reaction when we don’t win - it’s not an introspective look at what “I” did wrong, but instead it’s about the suits, or the halfpipe, or some other external issue that we aren’t responsible for.
Kids taught to be only participants never have the desire to excel as adults. In anything. By design. How could they? It’s like asking a hamster to explain the inner workings of a nuclear reaction. The cat doesn’t understand the language, much less the concept.
And a quick read of the 1963 Communist goals show why. Go back even further to ‘Bread and Circuses’. History is filled with the ashes of people/nations who CHOSE to stop excelling. Our problem is we did it to ourselves.