Forget the naysayers - America remains an inspiration to us all

Guardian ^ | May 11th, 2008 | Will Hutton

[The_Republican]

Browsing through an American bookshop does not lift the spirits. Books that chart the end of American supremacy, predict wars over finite natural resources, study the squeezed middle class or the catastrophic Bush presidency proliferate. The United States is going through a period of introspection and the Boston bookshelves, at which I spent part of last week, heave with the results.

In one respect, it is hardly surprising. Iraq, Afghanistan and the rise of China. The credit crunch. The $124 a barrel oil price. The unbelievable unfairness of Bush's tax cuts. The racism and violence that still pockmark American life. Yet the pessimism is overdone. The more I visit the US the more I think the pundits predicting the US's imminent economic and political decline hugely overstate their case. Rather, the next 50 years will be as dominated by the US as the last 50. The US will widen its technological and scientific dominance, sustain its military hegemony, launch a period of reindustrialisation and continue to define modernity both in culture and industry.

The fashionable view is that the American economy is a busted flush, a hollowed-out, deindustrialised shell housed in decaying infrastructure that delivers McJobs and has survived courtesy only of a ramped-up housing market and the willingness of foreigners to hold trillions of dollars of American debts.

China and India are set to overtake it in the foreseeable future. At best, the US will have to get used to living in a multipolar world it cannot dominate. At worst, it will have to accept, along with the West, that the new economic and political heart of the world is Asia.

The US economy is certainly in transition, made vastly more difficult by the spreading impact of the credit crunch. But the underlying story is much stronger.

[sirchtruth]

Holy moly I thought there were very few things worse than American scum journalism, and this tripe is definately one of those few things.

[browardchad]

Sure, the US has problems. It runs its financial system like a casino. It is a grossly unfair society. Its road and rail systems have been neglected for decades. University entrance has become too expensive. It has fetishised deregulation. Money corrupts its political process. To compromise the rule of law in order to 'win' the war on terror was stupid. But none of those problems can't be fixed and the US is about to elect a President who will promise to try, in a world in which it remains the indispensable power.

Right conclusion. Wrong path.

[hinckley buzzard]

Interesting comments follow the article. Virtually all of them are absurd, and based on popular but fraudulent leftwing views. Some simply regurgitate lies. As I say--interesting.

[piytar]

“Right conclusion. Wrong path.”

Beat me to it. My thoughts exactly.

[ken21]

i just met a bulgarian who immigrated to the u.s.

and he said this is the greatest land of all.

[Vision]

“America’s best days lie ahead. You ain’t seen nothing yet”- Reagan

[NoLibZone]

You guys have talked about withdrawing from the Union for a longer period of time then the Civil War was fought.

NHers are in no position to recognize the abilities of Americans.

[sirchtruth]

I went back and reread my earlier post. I didn’t communicate my thought clearly. What I was trying to say is the way the article was writen by the author appeared to trash this country, republicans, and Bush big time. And then went on to concluded we’d get over it! I don’t think what I wrote conveyed that properly in my previous post.