whyroots

No, there will be no greater generation. After all, it was the Greatest, not the Greatest So Far. There is nothing special about Americans, only their belief that there is, and America itself is decreasingly special. Americans, like anyone else, rise to the calls of leadership and necessity. The Greatest Generation was a response elicited by a vacuum in global power. "The American Century" was multi-determined and was not the expression of an inherently gifted hyperethical "generation".

Circumstance is not on the side of our generation. America is, after all, in relative decline. This means we will necessarily not make more money than our parents.  If trends are reliable, it seems we are entering an era of a multi-polar political world, which is most likely a good thing. So the confidence generated by American exceptionalism can no longer feedback to inspire Americans to greatness.

The best we ought to hope for is that we can be adequately cooperative with the world and not make horrible mistakes (cf. September 2001 – October 2008). But great leadership can get us halfway to "greatness." I think Obama's calls to a multi-faceted worldview may be this century's version of the calls to American world-stewardship. Thus, the sacrifice we should be prepared to make is to forgo the self-satisfaction of thinking too highly of ourselves. If we have a more modest view of ourselves, we may take government more seriously, allow it to provide services we earnestly need, and we may even care enough to hold our leaders accountable for their misdeeds.

-- Jacob Levine

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