Prometheus 6

I've left David Brooks alone for a while. I feel like he does less damage when he's diluted by other columnists. But today he's blaming China for America's cultural malaise...

The anxiety in America is caused by the vague sense that they have what we’re supposed to have. It’s not the per capita income, which the Chinese may never have at our level. It’s the sense of living with baubles just out of reach. It’s the faith in the future, which is actually more important.

rather than recognizing our current state as the inevitable, though exceedingly long term, result of starting where we started...

When European settlers first came to North America, they saw flocks of geese so big that it took them 30 minutes to all take flight and forests that seemed to stretch to infinity. They came to two conclusions: that God’s plans for humanity could be completed here, and that they could get really rich in the process.

and doing what we did.

This moral materialism fomented a certain sort of manic energy. Americans became famous for their energy and workaholism: for moving around, switching jobs, marrying and divorcing, creating new products and going off on righteous crusades.

This one sentence has an amazing error-to-syllable ratio.  I doubt actual humans are intended to read this because I don't know anyone who looks forward to switching jobs all the time. And this marrying and divorcing this is kind of recent. At the time of the nation's founding, women were almost as much property as Black folk (though they were silk as opposed to our burlap); divorces were not smiled upon.

I think the actual point here is to spin that which we are going to choose to do anyway as the natural result of Conservatism.

The U.S. now has an economy shifted too much toward consumption, debt and imports and too little toward production, innovation and exports. It now has a mounting federal debt that creates present indulgence and future hardship.

Americans could once be confident that their country would grow more productive because each generation was more skilled than the last. That’s no longer true. The political system now groans to pass anything easy — tax cuts and expanding health care coverage — and is incapable of passing anything hard — spending restraint, health care cost control.

And when you put it that way, he may be right. It would be much easier to get to a future that didn't come with the dead weight of a full third of the nation kicking, screaming and digging in its heels against any forward motion.