America Hits the Reset Button

Mario Tama / Getty Images The nation’s economic future is not as dire as it seems, Kurt Andersen argues in Reset. The country has been here before—and will survive again.

Remember the fable of the ant and the grasshopper? The ant is sober and disciplined, the grasshopper eats and plays and parties as if the good times will last forever—and then a killing winter descends. (In some tellings, the grasshopper dies; in some, the ant saves him.) Americans are, God bless us, energetic grasshoppers as well as energetic ants, a sui generis crossbreed, which is why we’ve been so successful as a nation. Our moxie comes in two basic types. On the one hand, we possess those Yankee virtues embodied by the Founders: sobriety, hard work, practical ingenuity, common sense, fair play. But then there’s our irrepressibly wilder, faster, and looser side, that packet of attributes that make us American instead of Canadian: impatient, hell-bent, self-invented gamblers, with a weakness for confidence games, and for blue smoke and mirrors. A certain fired-up imprudence was present from the beginning—sailing across the Atlantic in the early 17th century? In little wooden ships? To fashion radically new lives? In an uncharted wilderness? Crazy, man.

Just as our two-sided national character has always toggled back and forth between its steady and its skylarking aspects, so, too, does our national history run in cycles.

But it took us a couple of centuries for the dreamiest, most extravagant version of the American Dream to take hold of the national imagination. The accidental discovery of gold in Northern California in 1848 provoked a mad scramble by tens of thousands of ambitious fortune seekers from all over America and the world to descend on San Francisco and the nearby hills and valleys. For the first time, there were riches for the plucking by anyone, and no adult supervision. Real life briefly resembled a fairytale.

And ever since, we Americans have been repeatedly wont to abandon prudence and the tedium of saving and building in favor of the fantastic idea that anybody, given enough pluck and luck and liberty, can make a fortune overnight. How perfect it was that in the 1990s, the freshly discovered marvels of digital technology provoked a mad scramble by tens of thousands of ambitious fortune seekers from all over America and the world to descend on San Francisco and vicinity in pursuit of the latest ultra-dreamy version of the American Dream. Of course, just as the Gold Rush had ended by the early 1850s, in 2000 the dot-com bubble popped. In both instances, a lucky minority had gotten rich, and most of the unfortunate majority dusted themselves off and got on with their lives. Today, once again, the bursting bubble has been bigger in Northern California, with house prices dropping and foreclosures increasing far more there than in America at large.

The point is that while our country and our national self-perception must now change significantly, we have been here before. It’s simply time to ratchet back our wild and crazy grasshopper side and get in touch with our inner ant, to be more artisan/enterpriser and less prospector/speculator, more heroic greatest generation and less self-indulgent baby boomer, to return from Oz to Kansas, to become fully reality-based once more.

Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America. By Kurt Andersen. 96 pages. Random House. $15. And not coincidentally, just as our two-sided national character has always toggled back and forth between its steady and its skylarking aspects, so, too, does our national history run in cycles. These cyclical tides in the political zeitgeist were spotted by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Adams in the 19th century, and by the historians Arthur Schlesinger Sr. and Jr. in the 20th. According to the Schlesinger model, we are now at the start of the 15th alternating cycle since the founding of the United States, currently making yet another of our periodic shifts from an unfettered zeal for individual getting and spending to a rediscovery of the common good. The switch has flipped again, and “the business of America is business” no longer seems inarguably true, but narrow, callous, a little crazy. It’s the way our history has always unfolded, back and forth and back and forth again.

Yet in fact, according to my reading of American history, there are two interconnected but semi-independent cyclical waves, one for politics and the general national spirit, the other for economic growth and contraction. Think of the two wave systems as running along the same timeline but moving perpendicular to each other, politics on the horizontal weaving right to left to right, economics on the vertical weaving up and down. Each wave system affects the other, but unpredictably, since each one has its own waxing and waning dynamic, and its own frequency.