Nicholas Eberstadt, AEI scholar, U.S. must fix nation’s flaws post-COVID

Americans must take advantage of the problems exposed by the coronavirus pandemic and “repair” the nation’s existing flaws, American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt said Wednesday.

“We should be seeking a social and economic revitalization of our nation; a bold and thorough overhaul of our public and private ways to spark a dynamic upswing in progress for everyone,” Mr. Eberstadt, a think tank expert in political economy who researches foreign and defense policies, said in remarks streamed to colleagues online. “The vision, the design, should be prosperity for all. This can be done, and a revitalized America is a prize worth fighting for.”

If America does not become proactive, it risks a dramatic transformation of the U.S. economy and society, according to Mr. Eberstadt, who said such a transformation was the “intended consequence” of many government-initiated measures responding to the coronavirus pandemic.

Failing to deal with the nation’s snowballing debt problem will lead to the “Japanification” of the United States, Mr. Eberstadt said in a speech accepting the think tank’s Irving Kristol Award.

“Before COVID, Japan had been creeping along for three decades on less than 1% per year growth in per capita output — a pace that takes nearly 80 years to double incomes,” Mr. Eberstadt said. “The specter of Japanification is already haunting Europe. Soon it could be coming to your town, too. Japanification was not a natural disaster, it was man-made, largely through years of inadequate reform and response in the face of a major crisis, the bursting of the Japanese financial bubble.”

Mr. Eberstadt said that if the country makes the wrong choice, Americans will go down in history as the people “who chose against exceptionalism, who decided that being just another sluggish, demoralized social democracy was good enough for us and posterity.”

“To steer away from this very grave danger, we need a very different vision of the future. Such a vision should of course posit a rapid and orderly build-down from war-style mobilization by the U.S. government and its central bank,” Mr. Eberstadt said in a speech accepting the think tank’s Irving Kristol Award. “But simply restoring the pre-COVID status quo ante is not a hill many of us would be willing to die on. That was a world where the American Dream was already faltering. Where too many Americans, especially younger Americans, were mired in a previously unfamiliar new misery.

Mr. Eberstadt said he viewed the problems facing the United States as serious but not hopeless and urged America’s youngest generation to come to the rescue.

“Our culture, our society, our nation, none of these asks enough of you,” Mr. Eberstadt said to young Americans. “What I have in mind for you is a big ask, a world-changing ask. The national renewal of a great country that needs you. I don’t have a plan to show you, a plan won’t bring our fractured nation together for a common purpose. We need vision, the vision right now, for where we want to take our nation tomorrow.”