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Schlesinger, some of whom will try to wipe the smile off Wattenberg’s face.

They won’t succeed. There is too much intelligence behind that smile. Wattenberg insists, too, that America is a happy place as well as an objectively good one: “I believe, despite what we hear these days, that the American experience has been a successful one— that it has set into motion a remarkably healthy and creative process around the world. And I believe that most Americans share that view.” He wants to make them unafraid to express it. Optimism nowadays seems not so much erroneous as indecorous. Pessimism has been bullish, a growth industry of sorts, that has created a new class of critics and regulators who condemn the surplus of prosperity even while rechanneling it to themselves; quacks with a vested interest in hypochondria.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Schlesinger, some of whom will try to wipe the smile off Wattenberg’s face.

They won’t succeed. There is too much intelligence behind that smile. Wattenberg insists, too, that America is a happy place as well as an objectively good one: “I believe, despite what we hear these days, that the American experience has been a successful one— that it has set into motion a remarkably healthy and creative process around the world. And I believe that most Americans share that view.” He wants to make them unafraid to express it. Optimism nowadays seems not so much erroneous as indecorous. Pessimism has been bullish, a growth industry of sorts, that has created a new class of critics and regulators who condemn the surplus of prosperity even while rechanneling it to themselves; quacks with a vested interest in hypochondria.