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It is unbelievable -- and unacceptable -- that at the moment when much of the world seeks to follow American political and economic ideals, the country should consider itself too broke to live up to these ideals, at home or abroad.
It is unbelievable -- and unacceptable -- that a people responsible for unprecedented achievements in this century should accept mediocrity and slow decline in the next.
But must America lead? Why not try for the good life without world responsibility? Why not, in Luce's words, settle for being a more powerful Switzerland? Partly because Switzerland has always been only Switzerland, while America, after playing its global and historic role, would suffer a permanent sense of loss and dislocation. But more important, the world has become too interdependent for the U.S. to create a prosperous, isolated enclave.
While America's power to influence the world environment has declined, it has not disappeared by any means. But to wield such influence, the first task for the U.S. is to renew and rebuild itself, to restore its economic growth and productive capacity and replenish its wealth.
The Second American Century must begin at home.
It must begin in the schools and factories, on the mean streets and the crumbling highways.
It must begin in people's minds. Nearly half of all Americans polled believe we are in decline, overtaken by the Japanese and others. That could be a healthy stimulus to greater effort. But the Second American Century requires a more accurate sense of reality -- neither the heedless optimism that once held everything to be possible for America, almost as a law of nature, nor the new, creeping pessimism that considers America's downfall inevitable.
Of course, all world powers sooner or later decline, but the timing is not foreordained.
The Second American Century must begin with the realization that America's problems are not primarily imposed from outside, not by the wicked Japanese or the Colombian drug lords, but by us.
It must begin with a recognition that the American concept and practice of freedom have been distorted. To the founders it was self-evident that freedom required obligations; in the past half-century the notion of a citizen's obligations virtually disappeared from public discourse, while "duty" came to be almost a code word for fascism. About the only thing that is talked about, demanded, praised is citizen's rights (some of them pretty exotic). The Second American Century must involve a new balance of rights and obligations.
We still have tremendous resources. Our share of the global product is about what it always was, except in the unnatural years following World War II when much of the world was prostrate. And our GNP is almost twice that of any other country.
But other measurements are far more discouraging: our trade and budget deficits; the decline in our productivity; our personal savings rate, now a third of Japan's. Perhaps worst of all, not even three-quarters of our students finish high school (compared with 95% in Japan), and most of those who do are miserably educated. Statistics aside, everywhere there are signs of inefficiency, from the space program to the military to everyday services.
None of this is irreversible.