Switching to Optimism

Americans have much to complain about: blocked reforms, the economic legacy, social tensions. But complaining is unpatriotic, say experts who watch America. Here are two of the best new books on the United States in this election year.

The new world order is ahead of the old in at least one respect: optimism. “Yes We Can” was not just Barack Obama’s victory slogan; in its individualized sense, it was and still is America’s leitmotiv. Those who immediately seize on the nation’s deep injustices are quickly seen as fouling their own nest. In contrast, your basic complaining German doesn’t hesitate to stick his finger deep into the open wounds.

Title choices make it clear early on in which direction the authors Josef Braml (“The American Patient”) and Christian Wernicke (“America’s Last Chance”) are headed in their books dealing with Barack Obama’s first term in the Oval Office and the coming presidential election.

The books use two different research methods in examining America’s body politic, but they eventually arrive at the same diagnosis.

Political scientist Josef Braml examines America’s condition with a scientific x-ray scan, and his diagnosis is as clear as it is devastating: The United States suffers from social imbalance, political impotence, economic arrhythmia and an acute lack of energetic drive. These massive impairments could lead to collapse, but in any case, they at best make it difficult for the U.S. to represent its own interests “as reasonably as usual.”

Braml’s diagnosis of the inner political and economic problems begins precisely and factually. This is followed by pages that deal categorically and in detail with foreign policy. As accurate as the data are, they nevertheless distract from the focus of his book.

The book does, however, lead up to a conclusion that offers a solution to America’s crises: A complete about face in energy policy, coupled with a cold-turkey withdrawal from America’s addiction to oil. That’s the only way the United States can create more flexibility in its foreign policy and finally restore its traditional spirit of innovation — not to mention overcome its economic problems.

It is here that he shows how German policy could clearly influence Washington. Braml is an experienced scientist. He is accustomed to proposing solutions and giving advice based on the expertise he gained through his service to the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP). But for the reader who only wants a better picture of America’s inner condition, that approach seems contrived.

Braml’s weaknesses are more than compensated for by the journalists Reymer Klüver and Christian Wernicke. But they don’t paint a rosy picture either. On the contrary, they portray an America in which people sleep in their cars because they have had their homes repossessed and people who are flat broke can’t even afford to go to the dentist.

It’s the same America from which Braml is reporting and delivering data to support the claim of social inequality. Example: The average net worth of white Americans is eight times that of blacks. Example: Reforms are being strangled, and Americans are oblivious to what’s actually happening. And it’s an America that seeks a cure based on the beliefs of the founding fathers, even if they have been dead for over 200 years.

Klüver and Wernicke have been reporting from the United States for the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung for nearly seven years, and they have gone directly to the root of the misery. They interview both the perpetrators and the victims of the real estate crisis — and in some cases the same individual can be both: Victims because some real estate dealers and banks engaged in predatory lending practices; perpetrators because they thoughtlessly and unrealistically took the money offered and then ignored the obligation to repay.

The authors also provide political and economic context. Why so many see China as a threat and why the once hasty push for de-industrialization has now become a curse along with that other curse looming mildew-like over the country: the cost of two wars that continues to grow despite the fact that both have essentially been won. They’ve produced an army of warriors wounded both physically and spiritually who will require medical attention lasting decades.

The chosen have to live with their fate

The chapter on “American exceptionalism,” the much-vaunted special position Americans enjoy, reads almost like cynicism; this exceptionalism seems surreal considering the country’s misfortunes. Yet this tenacious belief in a special place explains why the United States accepts the trials and tribulations without complaint: The chosen are bound to accept their fate.

When historians like Andrew Bacevich (“The End of American Exceptionalism”) talk about that condition, they get accused of fouling their own nest. When Klüver and Wernicke visited Bacevich in Boston, he explained why it wasn’t a good idea for a U.S. president to publicly mention the nation’s problems. Jimmy Carter did so in 1979 in his so-called “malaise” speech and was quickly slapped down for it. One year later, he lost the presidency to the feel-good candidate, Ronald Reagan.

It’s another reason why social critic Obama recently switched over to the optimistic path. Pessimists don’t stand a chance in America. Bacevich sees this as a cardinal flaw in the American system because it encourages politicians to promote a popular but misguided view of life and a false feeling of freedom.

The journalists’ point of view also fails to offer much illumination, but it’s to the credit of both authors that they resist the temptation to refute the widespread but unsubstantiated optimism in America. That’s also why “America’s Last Chance” is also an excellent book — it doesn’t try to answer all the questions.