Prologue: A Nation of Heretics

Catholic Education Resource Center ^ | 6/4/12 | Ross Douthat

[marshmallow]

After the great crash of 2008, Americans awoke and saw their country the way anti-Americans have always seen it: spendthrift, decadent, and corrupt. The city on a hill had become a mismanaged empire; the land of self-reliance was buried in debt. Our political class had run up enormous deficits at home and entangled us in never-ending military operations overseas. Our financial elites had been exposed as reckless, self-deluded speculators who had gambled away the country's economic future and then gone begging for a bailout. And the whole mess had been made possible by middle America's relentless appetite — for bigger houses, bigger portfolios, bigger government programs, bigger everything, and damn the long-term cost.

During the 2008 election season, the extraordinary unpopularity of George W. Bush made him an obvious scapegoat for these debacles, and the charisma of Barack Obama made him a convenient savior figure. By the fall of 2010, it was Obama's turn to take the blame, while the Tea Party offered a right-wing version of hope and change. But even as Americans turned the parties into and out of office, most of them understood that the rot ran deeper than the White House and Capitol Hill, and that there were trends at work that couldn't be reversed by simply dispatching a more talented set of leaders to Washington, D.C.

Thus the ongoing search for more comprehensive theories of American decline. Some of these theories are ideological: Conservatives denounce liberals as free-spending socialists, while liberals denounce conservatives for championing a cult of deregulated dog-eat-dog. Some theories are structural: On the left, in particular, there is a widespread sense that America's creaky eighteenth-century institutions are no longer capable of responding to the challenges of a polarized country and a globalized world. And some theories are frankly conspiratorial, involving perfidious foreigners.........

[RitaOK]

Thank you for a great post. Very interesting analysis. Seems we are suffering mental, emotional and spiritual jet lag, from a culture speeding us toward imminent collapse.