Via Weekly Standard:
There’s a very curious op-ed in The Los Angeles Times today by Rosa Brooks, who is identified as “a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center and a fellow at the New America Foundation.” She has a curious and disagreeable premise:
Stung by Republican attacks, Obama has been insisting that he’s no declinist. In last week’s State of the Union address, he nearly out-Romneyed Romney, proclaiming, “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”
That’s dangerous pabulum. Any honest diplomat will tell you that American power and global influence is waning, and if we shy away from acknowledging that fact, we’ll only speed up the process.
By many measures, we’ve hollowed out the American dream: American life expectancy ranks well below that of other industrialized democracies, and the same is true for infant mortality rates and elementary school enrollment rates. We have the highest documented per capita incarceration rate in the world. And as the Occupy Wall Street movement has helped point out, we have greater income inequality in this country than in any other state in the developed world — and most states in the developing world.
America’s in decline? That’s a debatable proposition, though clearly Brooks is doing her level best to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. However, it’s an astonishing statement to make considering what was left out of Brooks’s bio at the end of the piece. Brooks is formerly a “Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy” in the Obama administration.