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“There are no second acts in American lives,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald near the end of his own tragic first act. But while “The Great Gatsby” author may have written one of America’s greatest novels, he also penned one of our most debunked phrases.
As it turns out, American life is replete with second acts, exemplified most recently by Donald Trump’s return to office. Other presidents, from Andrew Jackson to Richard Nixon, also came back from crushing electoral defeats to win the White House. Entertainers, too, such as Frank Sinatra and Tina Turner, famously turned around ailing careers and emerged as more mature, successful artists.
Countries and societies have second acts as well. Think about the Roman and British Empires, which rose from the ashes of violent civil war to enjoy long periods of unparalleled power. The same thing happened in the United States.
Indeed, a little more than a decade after the end of our own devastating Civil War, America had surpassed Britain as the world’s largest economy and was on the cusp of becoming the world’s center of scientific, cultural and industrial innovation—a position it enjoys to this day. Likewise, the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s were followed by several decades marked by technological innovation and high economic growth at home and victory in the Cold War abroad.
I believe the country is once again on the brink of another second act—or rather a fifth or sixth one, depending on which historian you consult. In many ways, we’ve already begun this next phase of renewal, as many of the elements that will undergird this national renaissance are already in place.
In the past decade, for instance, the United States has become an energy superpower through its development of hydraulic fracking, allowing us to use our supply of relatively cheap oil and gas to strengthen everything from our industrial base to our alliances with energy-dependent states in Europe and Asia.
Meanwhile, America leads in the development of most of the newest cutting-edge technologies, from AI to space travel to synthetic biology. For all the talk of the threat from China, the most impactful work in new industries is still largely being done here.
There are other positive signs too. American GDP growth [ [link removed] ] and worker productivity [ [link removed] ] have in recent years exceeded expectations. These numbers are likely to get even better, with productivity growth benefiting greatly from the AI revolution that is just beginning.
But there are also less quantifiable trends that point to national renewal. For instance, the mood in the country seems to be shifting away from socially harmful ideas like equity and back to sounder ones like merit. In fact, this particular shift is already well underway, with everything from universities [ [link removed] ] to big corporations [ [link removed] ] abandoning diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
Meanwhile, with the incoming Department of Government Efficiency and other initiatives, we are about to embark on a once-in-a-generation effort to significantly reduce the size and scope of government. If this project proves to be even partly successful, it will greatly improve the country’s long-term fiscal and economic health.
Perhaps the most important shift may be a renewed sense of American greatness, even if some of the evidence is still pointing in the other direction. After enduring decades of elites hectoring us about the country’s faults and sins, it’s not surprising that feelings of patriotism—while strong and ever-present—are at historic lows [ [link removed] ], and that large majorities are pessimistic [ [link removed] ] about America’s direction.
At the same time, however, optimism is in our cultural DNA; part of the birthright bequeathed to us by a group of dreamers who set out 250 years ago to wrest control of their home from the most powerful empire on earth, on their way to building a continent-size nation.
And so it’s hard for me to believe that as everything I’ve described starts to filter into every segment of society, we won’t recover the same national spirit that allowed us to do everything from defeating fascism and communism to birthing virtually every major technological revolution of the past 100 years.
That’s not to say that America is without its problems. From profligate federal spending to a coarse culture that has proven particularly harmful to the young, we face real challenges. But our fundamental strengths, from our durable Constitution to the dynamism of our people, remain firmly in place and will carry us into yet another period of renewal.
Or, as Ronald Reagan famously said [ [link removed] ] in the midst of our last second act, “America’s best days are yet to come.”
Meanwhile ...
What I’m reading and watching: Back in November, my colleague Christina Behe made an impassioned defense of lowbrow and genre literature [ [link removed] ], arguing that it’s perfectly fine for sophisticated readers like herself to enjoy romance and fantasy novels as well as so-called serious works, the kind that win literary prizes. Occasionally, however, there is an author who straddles both worlds, someone who produces best-selling novels that neatly slot into a certain category like mystery or science fiction but who also is seen as a great writer. Certainly one of the best recent examples of this phenomenon is British spy novelist John le Carré.
Le Carré, who died in 2020, wrote more than two dozen best-selling novels, most of which are Cold War spy thrillers. But le Carré was also a critics’ darling, winning a steady stream of accolades from literary tastemakers.
Frankly, I’ve never been much of a spy novel fan. But about a dozen years ago a good friend introduced me to the 1979 television adaptation [ [link removed] ] of le Carré’s masterpiece, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” and I was hooked. The series, which comprises seven one-hour episodes and stars Sir Alec Guinness as spymaster George Smiley, has few of the tropes of typical spy stories. In the place of James Bond-like chases and fight scenes, the story unfolds in a series of drab offices, dark apartments and parked cars. The characters spend most of their time talking or waiting. And the good guys may not be any better than the bad guys. But the story is so compelling that it’s impossible not to get completely caught up in it.
After watching the “Tinker” series twice, I read my way through six of le Carré’s nine novels featuring Smiley, including “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” (which was made into a wonderful film in 1965 starring Richard Burton), “The Honourable Schoolboy” and “Smiley’s People” (also made into a series, once again with Guinness in the lead role). All are excellent and well worth your time. But “Tinker” is still the best of the lot, with a clutch of fascinating characters who inhabit a paranoid and murky world that is both ordinarily grim and utterly fascinating.
And while I’m at it: In 2011, “Tinker” was made into a film with a dream cast of actors, including Gary Oldman (as Smiley), Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Ciarán Hinds and Benedict Cumberbatch. While the movie is very good, at just over two hours, it doesn’t have enough time to tell le Carré’s complicated tale anywhere near as well as the much longer television series does. So if you don’t know the story, I’d hold off seeing it until you’ve read the book or seen the seven-part series.
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