Courtesy of Hit & Run, here’s a neat article from World Affairs on how the current crop of “America-in-decline” books & articles is nothing new:
As with the pessimistic intellectual troughs that followed the Depression, Vietnam, and the stagflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, there is a tendency among declinists to over-extrapolate from a momentous but singular event—in this case, the Iraq War, whose wake propels many of their gloomy forecasts.
It’s always easier to
- call for the end of the world, and
- pretend that now is how things are always going to be.
