The End of Excess: Is This Crisis Good for America?

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Second Verse, Same as the First
Sixty-eight years ago, a founder of this magazine, Henry Luce, published an essay in LIFE celebrating a national history that had "teemed with manifold projects and magnificent purposes ... It is in this spirit that all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first great American Century." And so we did. The question now is how far we can extend our heyday of manifold projects and magnificent purposes. Golden ages and empires do come to an end.

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"History doesn't repeat itself," Mark Twain is supposed to have said, "but it rhymes." Does America in 2009 rhyme with the Britain of 1909? Back then, the British were finishing a proud century as the most important nation on earth — economically, politically, militarily, culturally. But the U.S. was coming on fast, having already overtaken the Brits economically. Between the beginning of World War I and the end of World War II, as America turned into the unequivocal global leader, Britain became an admirable also-ran, radically diminished as a global player. If the 21st century rhymed, China would be the new us — feverish with individual and national drive, manufacturer to the world, growing like crazy, bigger and much more populous than the reigning superpower. And our next half-century would, according to the analogy, unfold like Britain's in the first half of the 20th century, requiring a downsizing of our national ambitions and self-conception.

In fact, we surely will have to adjust the ways we think of ourselves. Still an exceptional country, absolutely, but not a magical one exempt from the laws of economic and geopolitical gravity. A nation with plenty of mojo left, sure, but in our 3rd century, informed by the wisdom of middle age a little more than the pedal-to-the-metal madness of youth.

The same goes for our individual senses of lifestyle entitlement. During the perma-'80s, way too many of us were operating, consciously or not, with a dreamy gold-rush vision of getting rich the day after tomorrow and then cruising along as members of an impossibly large leisure class. (That was always the yuppie dream: an aristocratic life achieved meritocratically.) Now that our age of self-enchantment has ended, however, each of us, gobsmacked and reality-checked by the new circumstances, is recalibrating expectations for the timing and scale of our particular version of the Good Life. Which, of course, fuels the ferocious anger at the Wall Street rich even now getting richer with subsidized eight-figure bonuses.

However, if most of our hypothetical individual futures don't look quite so lavish, as a nation we have two not-so-secret weapons that, managed correctly and given a little luck, could allow us to remain at the top of the heap for a long time to come: technological innovation and immigration.

For our past two centuries, a key to national prosperity and power was the extraordinary physical scale of our land, our population, our natural resources. China has similar advantages today, and partly because we have already been there and done that, paving the way, it has been able to develop in fast motion, cramming 100 years of development into 30. But I'm reminded of Philip Johnson's apt, bitchy description of Frank Lloyd Wright during the forward looking 1930s "as the greatest architect of the 19th century." Twenty-first century China is the greatest country of the 20th century. Muscular industrialism gets you only so far. Further increases in productivity and prosperity require ingenuity and enterprise applied at the micro scale — digital devices and networked systems, biotechnology, subatomic nanotechnology. As China and other developing countries finally achieve the industrial plenty that we enjoyed 50 years ago, the U.S. can stay ahead once again by pioneering the next-generation technologies that the increasingly industrialized world will require. (Read "Will China's Stock Market Rebound Before the S&P?")

And no other nation assimilates immigrants as successfully as the U.S. The sooner we can agree on a coherent national policy to encourage as many as possible of the world's smartest and most ambitious people to become Americans, the better our chances of forestalling national decline. The waves of exotic foreigners who arrived in the 19th and early 20th centuries were unsettling, but previous generations got over it, luckily, since those newcomers were instrumental in forging the American Century.

The next new America that hatches will not be some bizarro world opposite of everything that came just before. History proceeds dialectically. The New Deal era ended, but its basic social and economic underpinnings have endured. Notwithstanding the backlash against the 1960s, the changes born of that decade's sharp left turn — civil rights, feminism, gay rights, environmentalism, sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll — became part of the American way of life. In the same way, even as we now rediscover the need for sensible regulation and systemic fairness, the fundamentally good lessons of the Reagan age — entrepreneurialism mostly unbound, proud Americanism — will endure. The babies will not be thrown out with the bathwater.

We are in a state of shock. In a matter of months, half the value of the stock market and more than half of Wall Street's corporate pillars have disappeared, along with several million jobs. Venerable corporate enterprises are teetering. But as we gasp in terror at our half glass of water, we really can — must — come to see it as half full as well as half empty. Now that we're accustomed to the unthinkable suddenly becoming not just thinkable but actual, we ought to be able to think the unthinkable on the upside, as America plots its reconstruction and reinvention.

Andersen is a novelist of (Heyday, Turn of the Century), the host of the public-radio program Studio 360 and a former columnist for TIME

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