America 3.0

Michael Barone Recommends Some Books, including America 3.0

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Barone in seersucker

In a recent post entitled Reading Recommendations for Summer or Fall, Michael Barone mentioned several books that sound very good.

This passage in particular stuck out, for obvious reasons:

Nick Adams, The American Boomerang: How the World’s Greatest ‘Turnaround’ Nation Will Do It Again. There’s a grand tradition, starting with Alexis de Tocqueville, of foreign writers telling Americans more about their country than most Americans know or understand. Nick Adams, a young Australian writer, continues this tradition in this book about how the United States can rise again from its current doldrums.
 
This is a book to read in conjunction with two excellent recent books on Anglosphere exceptionalism, James Bennett and Michael Lotus’s America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century—Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come and Daniel Hannan’s Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World.

I had not heard of Nick Adams or his book, but I ordered a copy. I am eager to hear his assessment of how the USA is going to get out of this current mess and on to something better.

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Quote of the Day, or, A Challenge to the Millennial Generation

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They stand now on the threshold of public life. They are in the leash, but in a moment they will be slipped. What will be their fate? Will they maintain in august assemblies and high places the great truths which, in study and in solitude, they have embraced? Or will their courage exhaust itself in the struggle, their enthusiasm evaporate before hollow-hearted ridicule, their generous impulses yield with a vulgar catastrophe to the tawdry temptations of a low ambition? Will their skilled intelligence subside into being the adroit tool of a corrupt party? Will Vanity confound their fortunes, or Jealousy wither their sympathies? Or will they remain brave, single, and true; refuse to bow before shadows and worship phrases; sensible of the greatness of their position, recognise the greatness of their duties; denounce to a perplexed and disheartened world the frigid theories of a generalising age that have destroyed the individuality of man, and restore the happiness of their country by believing in their own energies, and daring to be great?

Conigsby, or The New Generation (1844) by Benjamin Disraeli.

Will they? Will they believe in their own energies? Will they dare to be great? Will they restore the happiness of their country? Will they denounce the frigid theories that have destroyed the individuality of man?

Incidentally the book is great.

Remember

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Remember:

It’s not R v. D. It is Reformers v. The Combine.

That said, most of the time R > D.

So think tactically.

Don’t make an imaginary best the enemy of a tangible good.

Don’t make an imaginary better the cause of a tangible harm.

Don’t personalize or hold grudges: We don’t just want to change people, we want people to change. Welcome it when it happens.

But remember:

The long game is make the GOP the reform party.