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But that moment could not last forever in a land whose central idea from the first Pilgrim landfall onward has been physical and spiritual renewal, the fresh start, the future in which literally anything is possible. Often in their history Americans have returned to that theme of vigorous dawn departures—physically to the frontier, spiritually in the Great Awakening, socially through the immense renovation of the New Deal.
Now, at the beginning of the '80s, Americans may be on the point of another departure. The '80s may witness, for example, a long-overdue transition from an emphasis on feeling—"If it feels good, do it!"—to a keener focus on thought; feelings, at least the transcendent obliterations accomplished with drugs or extravagant sexual experiments, do not solve problems. Nor do the lesser sybaritisms of a hot-tub culture that in the '60s and '70s elaborated the idea of consumer comfort into a supine and giggling version of decadence.
There seems now an awakening will to rescue the future from the bleak descending path, the rather mean history of the recent past. Of course, a rhetoric of optimism is standard for a little while just after the presidency changes hands.
Eras of good feelings and presidential honeymoons generally last roughly until the first daffodils appear on the White House lawn.
AND YET, THE NAtion's psychological atmosphere seems to be changing in a deeper way that may have nothing to do with the new presidency. The paralyzing tone of apology and self-denigration is vanishing from public discourse. Americans find themselves unashamedly eager to be Americans. Samuel Johnson's line ("Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel") was interminably quoted in the old skirmishes between hardhats and the dissident young; but patriotism was never merely that. Love of country must always be rescued from scoundrels (Know Nothing nativists, racists, anti-Semites and other thugs), and Americans seem to know that now, seem briskly capable of loving their country without being nationalistic bullies. In any case it has been years since some Americans went around spelling it "Amerika." Not that Americans have become moronically self-congratulatory; they just seem more realistically self-aware, less given to their previous extremisms, the essentially trifling Manichaeanism that saw it all in black and white.
The way the nation interprets itself is changing. Many believe that some time around the beginning of the New Frontier, the power of explaining America to Americans fell to a liberal, sometimes radical "new class"—academics, elitists, journalists —which, although accurate up to a point, somehow got the story wrong or told it from a vantage point of supercilious and frequently privileged hostility. "We have met the enemy and he is us," they wrote, quoting Pogo. Americans developed a moral inferiority complex of historic proportions: where once they hubristically viewed themselves as the world's best, many came to see America as the worst.