The Atlantic's slough of despond

Some time ago, The Atlantic's James Fallows wrote a reasoned, detailed and agnostic-to-hopeful assessment of the perception that the United States might be entering its long-anticipated decline.  Fallows concluded that the country has ample economic and cultural resources; that its fatal flaw might be the clunky democratic machinery bequeathed by the too-hard-to-amend Constitution; but that we had muddled through that difficulty in the past and might continue to do so (my take here).

A grimmer collective assessment is implicit in this month's Atlantic's dystopian take on the standard "year in ideas" feature.  This dyspeptic compendium may not reflect decline -- it's just fourteen journalists' perceptions -- but it does bespeak contagious pessimism begat by an anemic recovery.

The 14 biggest ideas of the year can mostly be placed three categories: no change, trivial change, and malign change. Or, sliced another way: lack of progress, useless diversion, and loss. Some of the changes -- the Arab Spring, wave elections, the rise of large middle classes in Asia -- are presented as at least potential positives -- but with a good deal of ambivalence. And in fact, those "ideas" in the "no change" and "trivial change" categories are mostly pretty malign too. Let's have a look: