James Fallows: the GOP Pulled Off an Institutional Coup With the Help of Enablers in the Media

Continued from previous page

JH: I agree wholeheartedly. I think part of this is also a natural sense of decline coming from the end of World War II when we controlled 50 percent of the world’s global economic output, to today when we’re a little bit below 25 percent. Obviously others are going to get into that game. I don’t think that’s something we need to fear.

JF: And it's relative decline -- having a smaller share of a bigger pie. I think that’s still nothing to worry about. In the old dimensions of national strength, including military, cultural, universities, and research on top of sheer economic output, the United States is still in a class of its own.

As your listeners will know, and as you’ve written, the texture of our society -- the change in my lifetime as a tattered baby boomer, from the relatively thick middle-class of my youth in California in the '60s to the polarization now -- I think is the proper area of worry. That’s what we have to worry about, not what’s happening in Japan, China or Korea.