Recommended: How America Can Rise Again

I continue to be impressed by the breadth and depth of the articles in The Atlantic magazine. The January issue has a number of good, thoughtful articles, but I especially recommend James Fallows' article How America Can Rise Again.

Fallows argues that the sense that America is failing or falling behind has been endemic in our society since the founding of the nation, or indeed even before, among the first colonists. One can look at almost any past decade and find much the same worries as are being expressed today. Yet America has not only survived, but prospered despite all these worries, and Fallows thinks this will continue, because of some fundamental features of American society. (Recall that George Friedman comes to much the same conclusion on the basis of geopolitics in his book "The Next 100 Years").

Fallows argues that in its own messy, democratic way our society is doing just fine, and a lot better than most other societies. He does, however, think our government has reached a level of terminal dysfunction, and is no longer adequate to the demands of the modern world. As he points out, the recent health care bill was assembled by Senators representing less than 10% of the nation's population, and a filibuster can be maintained by Senators representing as little as 12% of the nation's population -- hardly the way the nation's founders expected things to work.

This is a long and complex article, but well worth reading and pondering.