Peter Schwartz argued in the LATimes that Americans have been less optimistic than usual because:
"too many of us see change without progress and a world coming apart -- the dark dystopia of "Blade Runner" and "Mad Max" .....
"During the last 40 years, we lost faith first in science and technology, then in politics and finally in the economic engine of progress. Now science and technology seem poised to cause, not solve, problems -- "silent spring," smog and Chernobyl. Government is viewed as out of touch if not corrupt and incompetent -- Vietnam, Watergate, hanging chads and Katrina. Business, according to many, is rigged to reward an undeserving few while diminishing prospects for the rest -- oil crises, stagflation, a dot-com boom turned bust and Enron."
Peter
you are mostly wrong. Americans have lost some of their optimism
because they think we have lost another war (Vietnam was #1 and post 9/11 Iraq is
#2). The belief comes from the loud and dishonest voice of the current
American media and the Democratic Party that loudly proclaims we have lost Iraq.
Americans also live with a false history: we didn't lose in Vietnam, we
won and the Democratic Party gave South Vietnam to the North 18 months
later.
Of course as Americans slowly come to learn that we have won the war in Iraq, as much of the rest of the world already knows, our optimism will return.
Our optimism is returning, fortunately, and will be back by the end of the September Republican Convention.