Coming out of the 1970s and into the early 1980s, it really seemed that the US was on a progressive decline and that the American Century was going to be petering out early.
I believe it was Time Magazine, or maybe Newsweek, had a long, involved article telling us that yes, that was the case. We as a nation were no longer exceptional, we were in a slow and irreversible decline, capitalism was dying and finally being shown for the house of cards that it was, and that we should, by necessity, cede to the Soviet Union and its philosophy of communism its rightful places as the new and unquestioned leader of the world.
Thank God Ronald Reagan was sitting in the wings just waiting to say "Hold my beer and watch this!"
I wish I had save a copy of that magazine, and I wish I knew who wrote the article. It would have been a lot of fun to find the author's take on what happened over the next decade, culminating with the collapse of the "ascendant" Soviet Union...
In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the article written by that clown David Sirota in Salon magazine telling us what a glorious economic success Hugh Chavez had unleashed in Venezuela and how it was going to be the gold standard for national growth and existence and how much it had to teach the rest of the world.
