Anxious Empire

The American people are nervous and scared, and with good reason.

A recent article in the Washington Post has called for Barack Obama to pull an LBJ and declare that he will not seek re-election in order to “galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made” and quell rising American anxiety. The Toronto Star’s Richard Gwyn easily bats that nonsense down, noting that a president “who turns himself into a lame duck is scarcely likely to be able to mobilize the American people.” Gwyn argues that the real source of Americans’ anxiety is that they are coming to realize their country is “ceasing to be an exceptional nation.” More specifically, they’re realizing that their country is becoming like Ireland, Greece, or Portugal in that it can no longer avoid dealing with its crippling debt. Gwyn says the U.S. is in an “inescapable decline” brought on by its attempts “to do everything — to police the world, to run the world’s financial system” and to keep its standard of living well above its means to pay for it.

In the Globe and Mail, Jeffrey Simpson takes a shorter-term view, laying the blame for America’s slide on George W. Bush and all his ideological brethren who think they can cut the deficit while decreasing taxes. During Bush’s “disastrous presidency,” he, “like most Republicans since 1980, had fallen under a spell” that made increasing taxes verboten, Simpson writes, despite “the repeated evidentiary failure of these ideas.” These ideas continue to haunt America, and while Simpson doesn’t explain why the spell has spread to the Democrats (the answer: their fear that the Republicans will nail them on it come election time), he does note that they too are refusing to face facts. Instead of swallowing the bitter pill of spending cuts and tax increases, Obama recently devalued the U.S. dollar – much to the anger of China, who is owed billions of greenbacks in loan payments. “Among the great uncertainties of our time is whether lenders to the U.S. will be willing to accept this kind of haircut,” writes Simpson. “Those uncertainties plague all international discussions of economic matters.” And they make Americans very, very nervous.