Is America Giving Up on the Future?
There’s a glum desperation in the air that’s hard to escape: volatility, futility, and a McFuture ghoulishly wagging its skeletal finger at a lost generation.
So on what scale would you say transformation should happen? What’s the breadth of your vision for change?
It’s time to get not just serious, but maybe even a little bit radical. This isn’t a drill, but a nine-alarm fire. But where are the fire engines? Washington’s bogged down in games of brinksmanship instead of practicing the art of leadership. Hell-bent on running each other into the ground — instead of running the nation — America’s so-called leaders are sending us into what wonks are calling a “policy-induced recession.” Listen to what Robert Gates has to say about it:
I do believe that we are now in uncharted waters when it comes to the dysfunction in our political system — and it is no longer a joking matter…we have lost the ability to execute even the basic functions of government, much less solve the most difficult and divisive problems facing the country. Thus, I am more concerned than I have ever been about the state of American governance.
It’s bonkers, right? We’re confronted by the most ferocious, tenacious crisis in decades — and that’s when the Big Kahunas decide to squabble over whose got the biggest biceps? Unfortunately, it’s rationally irrational, tediously predictable — a textbook example of a competence trap. A crisis is exactly when you should expect body-checked jockeying for pole-position to occur, because that’s when political power counts most.
I’d say we’ve got a bad case of Reality Deficit Disorder. Call it America’s imaginariness problem.
Let’s start with the easy one: the financial sector trades imaginary “value,” which, when it gets “erased” by the trillion, sends journalists into paroxysms of fear and gloom. But, as
