Matt Bai: Of Debts and Doubts
[Matt Bai is a reporter for the NYT.]
...[G]enerations of Americans have sacrificed plenty for the nation’s cause, and there’s no reason to think we’ve lost the capacity. What makes this case for sacrifice [now] so much harder to embrace, perhaps, is that it goes to our national psyche, threatening our self-image as a land with limitless potential. While past generations have readily sacrificed for national greatness, debt reduction — at least in the gloomy way its advocates argue for it — feels like a call to sacrifice in the name of our national decline.
After all, this sense of limitless potential, too, is what we often mean by “American exceptionalism” — a concept that, as the reporter Karen Tumulty noted last week in The Washington Post, has recently come to permeate the rhetoric of leading Republicans. It isn’t simply that America, by virtue of symbolizing liberty, has a unique responsibility to shape the affairs of humankind. It’s also the belief that free markets can create a kind of endless prosperity, driving an economic and military dominance that exempts Americans from having to accept constraints or trade-offs.
For much of the Industrial Age, and especially between World War II and the oil crises of the 1970s, this was, in fact, reality. Wages and profits rose, the social safety net and the nation’s military reach both expanded, and government lived largely within its means. College education, suburban lawns, good pensions and blissful security all became part of the pact with the middle class, as much a part of the constellation of entitlements as Medicare and Medicaid.
Exactly who or what lost the never-ending expansion — liberal excess, conservative nihilism or simply the tide of technology and globalization — is the animating debate of modern politics. Whatever the answer, the fiscal commission’s point is that the limitless age is at an end....
Read entire article at NYT
...[G]enerations of Americans have sacrificed plenty for the nation’s cause, and there’s no reason to think we’ve lost the capacity. What makes this case for sacrifice [now] so much harder to embrace, perhaps, is that it goes to our national psyche, threatening our self-image as a land with limitless potential. While past generations have readily sacrificed for national greatness, debt reduction — at least in the gloomy way its advocates argue for it — feels like a call to sacrifice in the name of our national decline.
After all, this sense of limitless potential, too, is what we often mean by “American exceptionalism” — a concept that, as the reporter Karen Tumulty noted last week in The Washington Post, has recently come to permeate the rhetoric of leading Republicans. It isn’t simply that America, by virtue of symbolizing liberty, has a unique responsibility to shape the affairs of humankind. It’s also the belief that free markets can create a kind of endless prosperity, driving an economic and military dominance that exempts Americans from having to accept constraints or trade-offs.
For much of the Industrial Age, and especially between World War II and the oil crises of the 1970s, this was, in fact, reality. Wages and profits rose, the social safety net and the nation’s military reach both expanded, and government lived largely within its means. College education, suburban lawns, good pensions and blissful security all became part of the pact with the middle class, as much a part of the constellation of entitlements as Medicare and Medicaid.
Exactly who or what lost the never-ending expansion — liberal excess, conservative nihilism or simply the tide of technology and globalization — is the animating debate of modern politics. Whatever the answer, the fiscal commission’s point is that the limitless age is at an end....