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The imponderables are enormous. The U.S. crisis has a complex global context. The emerging economies are not waiting for the United States to sort itself out. Global competition is intensifying. Our major firms are footloose. If they don’t make profits in the United States, they look abroad to much faster-growing markets. Nor is the ecological crisis waiting for the United States to act. Climate change, complete with intense storms, famines, floods, and other disasters, continues to intensify. And political instability is rife, especially in the regions that are suffering from a combination of poverty, population growth, and severe environmental stress. In that category we should include Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and the countries of the Sahel. The U.S. military is involved in all of them, but with no benefit, since the underlying causes of the crises have no military solution.

Nobody can predict political outcomes in circumstances like these. Life is full of surprises, both positive and disastrous. The years 1989–1991 fit into the spectacularly positive column. A social disaster, the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet communism, which had been born in the chaos of World War I seventy-five years earlier, quietly gave way to peaceful political change. A great leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, presided over the change of order, and one of the greatest triumphs of modern politics resulted: a mostly peaceful dismantling of an empire. Ironically, very few Americans have an appreciation of what actually transpired, and, as is so often the case, claim credit when the credit is due to others.

Yet equally disastrous accidents happen as well. Any sane, responsible citizen of the world should ponder the dates 1914, 1917, and 1933. The first marked the onset of World War I, not the war to end all wars as was advertised at the time, but the war to rip Europe asunder, with a wound so deep it has taken till now to heal, and the healing is still not completed. The second was the moment Russian chaos was manipulated by Vladimir Lenin to launch the ruinous experiment with Soviet socialism. The third, in the depths of the Great Depression, was the unexpected and wholly accidental rise to power of Adolf Hitler.2 The economic crisis of 1933 meant that anything could happen, and the very worst did. The world was bled as never before and perhaps never again, since a similar total war could end the world itself.

These are morbid thoughts, but they are my darker forebodings prompted by the current political drift in the United States. Most of the time, drift leads only to more drift. Time is lost, but without calamity. Yet once in a while, political drift ends up in disaster. When the political and economic situation is as dangerous as it is today, cynicism and loss of time are far more dangerous than they look. History plays cruel tricks on the unserious. American political leaders have been in an unserious mood for years, unwilling to level with the American people.

The propositions that I’ve laid out in this book are politically feasible. They start with the individual: to pull back from hypercommercialism, unplug from the noisy media a bit, and learn more about and reflect on the current economic situation. A mindful economy calls on each of us with an above-average income to understand that if we are prudent, we can make do with a little less take-home pay. Much of affluent households’ consumption can be trimmed without disaster and quite probably with some gain in equanimity and satisfaction. The affluent probably incur as much buyer’s remorse as they do lasting pleasure from their luxury purchases.

It is, in my view, the Millennials, aged eighteen to twenty-nine in the year 2010, who more than any other group will shape the future of America in the next twenty-five years. They embody the future with all its complexity and transformation. Though 80 percent of Americans over the age of sixty-five are white non-Hispanic, only 61 percent of the Millennials are white non-Hispanic. (The data