VDH looks into his normally spotless crystal ball and sees a silver lining:

There are reasons for pessimism about the world in general and America in particular, which is more divided politically than at any period since the turbulent 1960s—torn apart by fresh arguments over the Second Amendment, the debt, the federalization of health care, and proposed amnesty for illegal aliens. Still, the general despair does not mean that there are not reasons for optimism, especially when we compare our lot with that of other countries. The United States still enjoys the most robust demography of the major Western industrial nations. Its Constitution ensures a political stability not found elsewhere. There is no danger of political dissolution of the sort that the European Union faces. We have been spared the riots and turbulence of Greece.

…

Despite high labor costs, overregulation, and increasing taxation, American tech companies profit from an informal and meritocratic culture that rewards talent more than it relies on hierarchies of birth, class, and tribe so common abroad. While American public school education is in crisis, and although the humanities have been politicized on our college campuses, American math, science, engineering, and professional schools in business and medicine still remain preeminent. That explains why in a recent Times Higher Education ranking of world universities, eight of the top ten institutions were American. California alone had more universities—Berkeley, Cal Tech, Stanford, and UCLA—among the top fifteen ranked campuses than any single nation except the United States as a whole. 

Bouts of collective pessimism are common in America, and the current episode of collective depression is understandable given our mounting debt and unsustainable entitlements. But we should remember one thing. In the past, when we feared seemingly great rising powers—from the dynamic Germany of the 1930s, to the Soviet juggernaut of the 1950s that put a man into space, to the supposedly unstoppable Japan, Inc. paradigm of the 1980s, to the much admired post-national European Union collective of the 1990s— all such rivals eventually imploded or sputtered. America, meanwhile,  recouped and regained its preeminence in peace and war.

Victor Davis Hanson is a great historian. His insights into California’s future (Mexifornia) was brilliant. His classic work on warfare in ancient Greece (The Western Way of War) is, as far as I’m concerned, required reading for any student of history. In this case, however, I really do think he’s looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses.

America has only been spared the riots of Greece because it still has control over its own currency, which allows it to devalue at will. Its social cohesion is decreasing by the day as its border states become battlegrounds between Mexican cartels and what remains of the law enforcement infrastructure.  The demographic changes that turned what should have been a slam-dunk election victory for Republicans into a farcical defeat will eventually split this country apart- Vox Day has predicted that this will happen as soon as 2033, and I’m not about to bet against that man. America’s spending is mind-boggling; there is no sense of accountability or responsibility in government and there has not been for decades. This country’s biofuels program is a gigantic waste of time, money, and valuable land . While America has certainly done well to exploit the natural riches of the Bakken formation, and its hydrofracking innovations have caused natural gas prices to collapse (to the definite benefit of consumers), it’s only a matter of time before the idiot liberals who run this country will seek to cripple that industry as well. The higher education industry is in a massive bubble right now, and I’m just waiting for its collapse to show the world that the universities of this nation are peddling vastly overpriced degrees in an industry heavily shielded by government from internal and external competition.

I have great respect for Dr. Hanson’s take on things. His erudition and skill as a scholar is second to none. In this area, though, I must disagree with his unduly optimistic take on the future and agree instead with Vox’s rather more nihilistic view. The one area where I do agree with VDH is that the future is not necessarily all that bleak. Even if the USA does, as I expect, break apart into three or four disparate groups of states united largely by political ideology- one socialist, one capitalist, and one neither here nor there- that dissolution will present opportunities as well as challenges. The part of the country that chooses to honour the Constitution will be the bit of the country that true lovers of freedom will want to live in, and where businesses will want to be.