WINTER COMES AGAIN. Walter Russell Mead contemplates the Fourth Turning.

Generation after generation of Americans has feared that the dream was coming to an end — and generation after generation of Americans found new ways to keep hope alive, reinvented the dream, and passed it on, strengthened and enhanced, for the future.

There is no guarantee that the United States will master our current challenges — but neither is there any guarantee that we will fail. The problems may be more complex, the pace of change faster, and the world more tumultuous than it used to be — but no generation of Americans has been as free of racism, as open to the talents of women as we are today. No generation has had the scientific and technical knowledge, the computer hardware and software, the means of education and communication that we have now.

And there’s something else.

The problems we face today are urgent and complex, but they are not the problems of failure. We are suffering the consequences of success.

We are not like Pakistan, Egypt, Russia, or dozens of other countries who are struggling with the consequences of decades and even centuries of failures to keep up with a changing world. America’s failures are the failures of a country on the cutting edge.

Countries like China and India are doing some amazing things, but they are playing catch-up. They are trying to get where we are, while the United States is moving forward into unexplored terrain. They are building industrial societies; we are seeing what comes next. They have a clear idea of the target in mind: a country where people are as rich as Americans. Our quest is different — harder, but perhaps also more rewarding.

We aren’t trying to recreate somebody else’s achievement or to replicate an already existing model. We are trying to do something new and different — we are making up a new kind of society as we go along. The challenges of America’s today are the challenges of everyone else’s tomorrow.

The essay is not Panglossian; it is a useful corrective to pessimism and decline. Read, understand, enjoy.