Reason magazine — January 1989

0atwong • 30th Dec 2005 • Asian Civil Rights, Conversation Pieces

Great article on the interelationship between immgrants and the strength of United States.

Reason magazine — January 1989
Over the past year America has become a nation obsessed with forebodings of decline. A perceptible gloom grips the nation’s political, corporate, and media elites. We have seen one bestseller, Paul Kennedy’sRise and Fall of the Great Powers, chart America’s progress down the road to relative insignificance and another, Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, paint America’s future–its young people–as essentially anti-intellectual, Philistine, and in conflict with the basic values of our civilization.

Yet even as they point out serious deficiencies–the primacy of consumption over production and military spending over the generation of wealth–the apostles of decline are distorting the objective reality of America’s actual situation in the world. In their passion to explode the Norman Rockwellesque mythology of Reaganism, the decliners ignore the assets that can help America reclaim its message to the world.

One common fallacy is to compare the United States to the fading empires of the past, most particularly Great Britain.

But unlike Britain, or any of the other past empires, the United States remains a relatively young nation, still in the process of establishing its own identity. Even after the debacles of the hst 15 years, including the disaster in Vietnam and widespread stagnation on the industrial front, this youthfulness gives us what Fuji Kamiya, a leading social commentator and professor at Tokyo’s Keio University, describes as sokojikara–a resiliency and ability to recover in new and often unexpected ways.

America’s sokojikara rests on three pillars–massive immigration, an entrepreneurial open economy, and vast natural resources. At a time when many critics suggest we refashion our national character to European or Japanese standards, we would be far better served by finding ways to build upon these unique advantages. In the process we can best find the strategy for America’s resurgence in our third century of independence.