Rose-coloured spectacles

I have just come across a column in Britain's Guardian by Will Hutton titled, "Forget the naysayers - America remains an inspiration to us all." The premise is that the current American pessimism is unfounded, that we shouldn't dwell on:

The fashionable view is that the American economy is a busted flush, a hollowed-out, deindustrialised shell housed in decaying infrastructure that delivers McJobs and has survived courtesy only of a ramped-up housing market and the willingness of foreigners to hold trillions of dollars of American debts.

China and India are set to overtake it in the foreseeable future. At best, the US will have to get used to living in a multipolar world it cannot dominate. At worst, it will have to accept, along with the West, that the new economic and political heart of the world is Asia.

Instead of this bleak picture, we must believe that:

[T]he next 50 years will be as dominated by the US as the last 50. The US will widen its technological and scientific dominance, sustain its military hegemony, launch a period of reindustrialisation and continue to define modernity both in culture and industry.

Hutton bases this a contention that the U.S. far outstrips the rest of the world in the really vital things that drive success, "universities, research base, commitment to information and communications technology and new technologies along with a network of institutions that supports new enterprise." He cites a number of statistics that demonstrate America's dominance.

Further, America is aggressive about fixing its current economic problems, has a dynamic political process fueled by the current presidential race, and "a belief that no problem can't be fixed." The only possible competitor, China, has nowhere near the institutions to support change; India is too far behind to catch up in less than centuries; maybe the EU can become "a genuine knowledge economy counterweight to America."

Hutton does allow that there are continuing problems:

It runs its financial system like a casino. It is a grossly unfair society. Its road and rail systems have been neglected for decades. University entrance has become too expensive. It has fetishised deregulation. Money corrupts its political process. To compromise the rule of law in order to 'win' the war on terror was stupid.

But no worries:

[N]one of those problems can't be fixed and the US is about to elect a President who will promise to try, in a world in which it remains the indispensable power.

If you've read this blog for any length of time, you probably can already guess my response: I really hope all this is true, but I think our problems create risks that undermine such a positive view. But I'm not the only one. Consider these quotes:

American democracy today is an offense to democratic ideals.

The object of the U.S. corporation is now naked and unashamed: it is to maximize financial gain for those who own it.

The U.S. system is not only socially unjust but also calamitously economically inefficient.

These quotes are from a 2002 book called The World We're In by British author...Will Hutton. In six years, Hutton seems to have turned completely around from a profoundly negative view to a belief that America really is the last best hope. And we all know what has happened in the past six years: a resource-wasting war of uncertain goals and outcomes, a chipping away at the democratic ideals that underpin the institutions Hutton extols, a dramatic increase in the power and wealth of the American corporation and those who run them, and so forth.

So what has changed? What has turned a respected journalist like Will Hutton into a defender of the United States? I would really like to know what has happened to his world view; is it fear of something else that has driven this U-turn?