Reflecting on the Last Four Years

The last time I remember the United States being a positive, optimistic, and more or less unified country was in the 1990s, during the Clinton Administration. While Bill made a lot of mistakes—especially his fateful decision to expand NATO eastward—I still think of his time in office as a happy era.

The Bush years were a period in which we were put into a state of hyper-vigilance about terrorism, were forced to go along with disastrous foreign wars, and then traumatized by a financial crisis tha...