Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America’s asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms of trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing, starting again, and repeating failure.

Both threats strike at the heart of democracy, which, as Alexis de Tocqueville famously highlighted in Democracy in America, depends on deep and diverse, non-market, decentralized social and civil connections to thrive

The modern, liberal democratic industrialized nation-state has been the dominant global force since the early twentieth century, the clear “victor” of last century’s great political clash. It came with defining functions now taken for granted. The provision of security. Great concentrations of legitimate power at the center, capable of utterly domi