Aretai

Insightful interview with Yuval Levin at AEI in the WaPo: “I’m hopeful. I’m not an optimist — I’m a conservative, so I have low expectations of people. But hope says we have the resources to do this right. Americans have always been attracted to a certain pessimism about the prospects of our society. From the very beginning, we’ve thought we’re not really up to this — or more specifically, our children are not really up to this. Our national anthem is a song about barely surviving the night: The great American achievement in that song is that the flag was still there. We’re worried now, and we should be. But Americans have proved themselves to be able to act on that worry. And if you think about the next 25 years, the next 50, who’s going to dominate that period? It’s the United States. This is ours to lose, and we could lose it. But I am hopeful that we may make the most of it.”