I liked his explanation about how the future never turns out anywhere close to our expectations, although I thought his actual prediction for the coming century was hokey. Thing I remembered above all - Americans always think the sky’s falling and the country’s going to hell. 20 years later, many of those same Americans long for those good old days, but they tend to hate them in real time. The US is only in its adolescence, geopolitically speaking, and we act like an angsty adolescent.

So, premature predictions of American decline is a feature more than a bug of the American psyche, and always has been. Everyone seems to share it these days, but I expect the future to defy it.