Newsweek has an article, The Fall of America, Inc., running down the successes, failures and modern challenges of the last century of these United States. Big deal, except this is by Francis “The End of History” Fukuyama hisself. If he’s concerned, I’m concerned.

“Reaganism (or, in its British form, Thatcherism) was right for its time. Since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, governments all over the world had only grown bigger and bigger. By the 1970s large welfare states and economies choked by red tape were proving highly dysfunctional. Back then, telephones were expensive and hard to get, air travel was a luxury of the rich, and most people put their savings in bank accounts paying low, regulated rates of interest.
….
Like all transformative movements, the Reagan revolution lost its way because for many followers it became an unimpeachable ideology, not a pragmatic response to the excesses of the welfare state. Two concepts were sacrosanct: first, that tax cuts would be self-financing, and second, that financial markets could be self-regulating.”