This week’s column was about the past year’s observations and predictions. The big story of 2013? Broadly: A Republican party that slowly, awkwardly, begins to come to terms with the changing facts of the nation it wishes to lead. A president set on a course – higher spending, higher taxes, a broader regulatory presence — that will put the federal government, and the idea of government itself, more at the center of American life. Mr. Obama means to be more revolutionary than LBJ, a big spender in a time of affluence, and as revolutionary as FDR, who changed fundamental assumptions about the citizen’s relationship to the state.
Americans will, day by day, in the coming year and over the next four, decide what they think of the new dispensation, whether it is good or bad, and if bad what can be done about it.
Republicans in DC are feeling bleak. Should they? Nah. Demographic and culture changes lean against them but despair is for sissies, and in any case the pendulum swings, even if its arc is sometimes wider or higher than expected. What’s going on in the states, with the economic rise of the Reds, and the relative sinking of the Blues, is instructive, and Americans will take note. Long term pessimists should maintain a daily optimism, a happiness and vigor in the day to day. This is a time for creativity and guts. Which means: it’s an exciting time to be alive.