"A Republic, If You Can Keep It," Ctd

Friedersdorf counters me:

I reject the notion that the United States of America is in a position so dire that it can only be saved by a particularly noble leader. Arguments for that proposition could be made for the tenures of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and maybe even FDR. It is notable that even those men never behaved as if that proposition were true, and anyway the challenges we face, however grave, pale in comparison to their burdens. Would anyone trade our challenges today for the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Great Depression, or World War II? I wouldn’t even trade places with the Americans who endured the Carter Administration.

This is a caricature of my position. We sure are lucky to have a president aware of the scale of the crisis - and I think it is far worse than the 1970s. We face fiscal collapse in a way the US has almost never faced before in a global marketplace that may soon rob us of the old safety net of a reserve currency. My position anyway is that it is the collapse of any desire for the common good, the evaporation of civic virtue that is our problem. No leader can save us from that. Only we can.