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  • Nostalgia, utopia or realism?

  • Fresh off the president's second inauguration, one recalls that the United States was founded by realists with vision, not by shrinking violets or Eeyores griping, "Forget it. That'll never work."
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    President Obama's address began by echoing Thomas Jefferson's proclamation of equality endowed by our Creator, and Abraham Lincoln's lament that our progress was scarred with blood drawn by the lash, and by the sword. Through 57 inauguration ceremonies, Americans are still torn between the desire for our nation to prove exceptional, yet weighted down by the limitations of human nature that the founders warned abundantly about. Not all nations are exceptional, as Obama implied in an interview a few years ago, but some are. Rome rose and fell. China declined for 400 years. Exceptional promise and performance often "return to the mean," as a statistician would say.
    Our country is no longer young, small, or an untested experiment. By some measure we live under the world's oldest living constitution. By any measure the country is large. In addition to the inveterate optimism that seeks a brighter future, the United States claims universal values. "Our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on earth," said President Obama, echoing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who echoed Lincoln and Jefferson.
    The United States now has a long record of accomplishment, but a persistent weakness of human nature is for success to lead to complacency. Success can also prompt a retreat into gauzy, idealized memories of the past. Hoop skirts and happy servants; sweated labor singing merrily while moving mountains with hand tools and pounding railroad spikes with sledgehammers. Complacency can lead to disdain for predecessors or fear of the future. Guilt masters among us insist that the past was worse than depicted, that terrible legacies of bloodshed and error can only be lived down by repudiating and departing from our traditions and forging a whole new attitude towards growth and change. Omelets can heretofore be provided for everyone, yet eggs need no longer be broken. The weather can be improved upon 200 years from now, if only our Promethean proclivities can be tamed.
    Selective memory is a universal vice. Perpetual tension between nostalgia and utopia distorts thinking at many places on the ideological spectrum, in many interpretations of history and in many projections for the future. The left insists that the 1950s were the good old days because one unionized breadwinner could support a family — yet the 1950s stank because women didn't have jobs and minorities didn't have rights. The right feels the 1950s were great because American military and economic supremacy held sway — yet the 1950s stank because commies ran amok with little resistance. All of the above were true to some extent, but explanations why and how recall the parable of blind men describing an elephant when each could examine only one appendage.
    President Obama's speeches sound stirring, but reading the text in a quiet room, the Second Inaugural Address seems like vague, utopian boilerplate. Full speed ahead on government spending; few specifics on how to afford it. Little appreciation for the business community; only an assumption that it can cough up cash as needed. Imagine wonderful programs; so what if the Senate hasn't passed a budget in three years.
    The conservative outlook is more cognizant and less indignant about the persistence of imperfection, human and otherwise. That's why the founders codified a few inherent rights into law and insulated the system against fads. In the presence of soaring rhetoric, realists sound like spoilsports, but reality gets its way in the long run. A ship of state with 312 million people aboard isn't going to be "transformed" anytime soon. The last presidential second term to be more successful than the first was James Monroe's from 1820 to 1824.
    Already an opportunity beckons. On Tuesday, the governor of Nebraska approved a new route for Keystone XL. Let's forge ahead nationally, reassure our Canadian allies and strengthen economic development that's been mutually beneficial for 198 years. Together with Canada we can work on incremental improvements in energy. If the U.S. and Canada can't get along, who can? Don't muff it, Mr. President.

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