March 7, 2015
“Americans have a long history of worrying about their decline,” notes Joseph Nye. Puritans in 17th-century Massachusetts lamented a fall from earlier virtue. The Founding Fathers fretted that the republic they had created might dissipate like ancient Rome. Modern scholars are a gloomy lot, too. Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, a think-tank, has written that, with America’s foreign policy in a state of collapse, its economy ailing and its democracy broken, the American century ended last year.