QOTW

Mark Blitz, in the December 11th Weekly Standard at 37 (alas, subscription only, for now), reviewing Michael Chan's "Aristotle and Hamilton on Commerce and Statesmanship":

Critics of America make endless complaints. Our liberty is selfish license that corrodes community. Our equality is a fraud that barely veils vast gaps between the undeserving rich and the undeservedly poor. Our silly arts seek a common denominator ever lower and more vulgar. Our faith is narrow-minded, irrational, priggish, and hypocritical. Our sciences threaten to destroy or degrade us. Our mad consumption leaves nothing for the future. What's more, we spread our corruption globally through imperial might wrapped in the delusion that it is liberal justice.

Hearing all this, one would think that American life is solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish, and our power soon to be thankfully short.

These concerns are excessive because they project the worst possibilities as if they were actual or inevitable, and not counteracted by better ones. Freedom is enterprise and responsibility, not only license. Equality is equality in rights whose exercise leads unsurprisingly to inequalities in wealth. Faith and reason can be generously allied. Outposts of beauty and intellect stand against our encroaching wilderness. Science properly guided is beneficial. Limiting or transforming tyrannies abroad serves foreign citizens as well as our own.