Victor Davis Hanson writes in NROnline a very bracing article: that America is not in the terminal decline that it seems, frankly, to me that we are. He names our universities; we have most of the really good ones on earth, even if we cannot educate children in public school.
(Hanson is one of the most thoughtful of all journalists, and he's also a military historian and former classics professor, who has a long view of things.)
Here in America we have a nation which was founded entirely on a political idea and codified. We deliberately have an open and transparent society and it's been the result of two centuries of people who decided that America would be a meritocracy, and not judge people, as is done in the Middle East, by religion; not by caste as the Indians do; not by accents as the Europeans do; but by what people themselves can do. He points out, very rightly, that it is inconceivable that a black man could be president of France, even though France has traditionally been very friendly to blacks.
The Obama experiment of the last three years did not bring prosperity, and is likely soon to prompt a sharp reaction and a return to the American devotion to individualism and choice that made us the wealthiest nation in history. The American model is the antithesis of the socialism, Communism, theocracy, and statism that have impoverished so much of the world -- and the 21st century has brought that fact home in a way few imagined.
I hope he's right; I hear the dinning of entitled voices everywhere, voices which have been nurtured in resentment and who will not give it up for the honest work of honest work.
Suddenly I get Obama's sneer about American exceptionalism. To a progressive, there is no exceptionalism except his own because it hurts to look up to anything. And, if we can beat down the progressives, the equal-opportunity destroyers of wealth and prudence and character, the 21st century will also be an American century.