“Old fashioned” virtues of a marketplace economy free of a tax code no one can comprehend; environmental policies that slow and kill development; a federal government grown too large to do anything well—remember ObamaCare
Most of us know whether we are living in good times or bad. Some of us warn of decline when we see it coming. Some choose to ignore it by distracting themselves. The latter assume they cannot change events, but in a democracy where you get to vote for who represents you, we are all participants in one fashion or other, whether we vote or not.
If Hillary Clinton is elected President in 2016, historians and those who have lived through the first twenty years of this new century will see this score of years as one that began with much hope and descended rapidly into an expanding Islamic war on the world, seen most dramatically on 9/11 and followed by a financial disaster in 2008 that was widely predicted as the government pressured banks to make bad mortgage loans. It is doing that again.