as you may know, i am not tom friedman's biggest fan. one thing that's...interesting about him - captured in today's column or in the new book - is that he's an 'american exceptionalist,' a screeching nationalist (depite his apparent internationalism), in a particular sense: the only real question is how we can re-assert our dominace of the world economy: everything (education, foreign policy etc) is devoted to that end. that's what 'restoring american greatness' means. i'm not sure what that's worth, to be honest. for example, let's say that friedman's big fear is realized and china overtakes us economically. offhand, that's liable to bring a lot more people out of poverty. i hate seeing poverty, but i'm not sure that, other things being equal, a situation in which chinese people stay poor and we do better is any better than the reverse.
when i think of american exceptionalism, i don't think of dominance in global capital. i think of a republic established on individual rights and liberties, a tradition of limited government, emersonian self-reliance: cussed independence, anti-authoritarianism, and basic good sense. i think of the whiskey rebellion or john brown or william lloyd garrison. i think 'a country boy can survive' or malcolm x. i don't think of heaping up riches through an alliance of capitalists and politicians, etc., or the beauty of extreme bureaucracy. being broke is as good for those values as is being wealthy. when the housing market tanked, they stopped tearing apart the countryside down here for subdivisions and strip malls. that is ok.
