archive

Are America’s best days behind us?

From U.S. Intellectual History, Andrew Hartman on the Culture Wars: Notes towards a working definition (and more and more and more and more). Robert Westbrook reviews The Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers (and more and more and more). Is 2011 the dawn of America's new optimism? Charles Simic on the new American pessimism. Peter Dale Scott on the Doomsday Project, deep events, and the shrinking of American democracy. What we have seen in North Africa and the Middle East is that a dictatorship can be taken down; what we are seeing in the US is that a stable democracy can be chipped away at as well. From The Economist, a debate on whether America's political system is broken. Is America ungovernable? If you want to see the future of America, look at Europe of the 192s and 30s. A review of Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right by Dominic Sandbrook (and more). From Time, are America's best days behind us? Fareed Zakaria investigates (and a response by Joseph Nye); and David Von Drehle on why you shouldn't bet against the United States; and more on how to restore the American Dream. Why America will stay on top? An interview with Paul Johnson. Sam Roggeveen on America should be aware of its own decline. A review of Bruce Ackerman's The Decline and Fall of the American Republic. Is America in a race to the bottom, or are we going through what the Austrian born economist Joseph Schumpeter would call a process of “creative destruction”? Why the fall of American Empire can be a good (and peaceful) thing. David Bromwich on the US as a superpower bypassed by history. A panel on The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas by Steven Weber and Bruce W. Jentleson. Joseph Grosso on the mythology of American exceptionalism. Stuff of Legend: American exceptionalism is a flawed idea, but Obama should still use it. How did "American exceptionalism" become a conservative shibboleth? Comic-book hero Captain America makes his film debut later this year; his big-screen appearance — and that of other superheroes — reveals the US’s new unease.