A Jubilant Undertaker

Peter Beinart is the author of the recently published The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (2010). The book looks at the United States and attempts to answer the question - - "So where does ambition end and hubris begin?" Beinart looks at three time periods in our collective history - - (1) Woodrow Wilson with his progressive global vision, (2) Lyndon Johnson and his Camelot intellectuals that took us into Vietnam, and (3) George W. Bush and the post-cold war neoconservatives.

Beinart writes the following:

What America needs today is a jubilant undertaker, someone like Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan who can bury the hubris of the past while convincing Americans that we are witnessing a wedding, not a funeral. The hubris of dominance, like the hubris of reason and the hubris of toughness before it, has crashed against reality's shoals. Woodrow Wilson could not make politics between nations resemble politics between Americans. Lyndon Johnson could not halt every communist advance. And we cannot make ourselves master of every important region on earth. We have learned that there are prices we cannot pay and burdens we cannot bear, and our adversaries have learned it, too. We must ruthlessly accommodate ourselves to a world that has shown, once again, that it is not putty in our hands.