What comes next?

Writing for the New Yorker, George Packer wonders in "The Fall of Conservatism" whether the conservative movement has run out of ideas. He ends his long (nine page) piece with a look at the candidacies of Obama and McCain and their respective abilities to connect with the voters who will ultimately determine the electoral results in November.

And it occurs to me only now that by Packer's analysis, I've lived my entire life inside the age of conservatism that he now claims is dying:

The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just beginning the most improbable political comeback in American history.

Perhaps this reading of history helps to explain my strong attachment to Obama's candidacy and it what it represents.

And maybe it also serves to clarify my own misgivings about what comes next and my reservations about what government can and should do.

We live in a different time from that of FDR, when economic depression and international events presented clear and immediate threats to the well-being of our nation and its citizens. Nor are we faced with the threat of life ending suddenly and awfully all around us, a fear that lasted from the 50s through the 80s (one night in '83, I wondered for a bit whether distant lightning was a nuclear first strike... the threat seemed that close at hand). And we're no longer living in the 90s when, for just awhile, it seemed like the world was on a wholly different path and maybe we really were living in the best of all possible worlds.

We're somewhere and "somewhen" else now. I believe that we're soon going to be facing the sorts of challenges that will require a strong national resolve, just as we did in FDR's time. I fear that technology and interconnectedness is making it more possible every day for the world to again fall under the shade of calamity and collapse. And I think that in some sense that that golden path of the 90s was a distraction, a party that let us believe that things were going to be a lot simpler than they've turned out to be.

Obama is right when he speaks to the uniqueness of this time that we live in and "the fierce urgency of now" that calls upon us to come together and solve these growing challenges that we face.

Whether any leader is up to this task I can't say. Whether we are as a people is also arguable. We've done it before. Doing it again will require that we give something up, and that's not an ethic that's been cultivated much in America the last few decades.

Now is a time to be questioning our assumptions and opening our minds.

Not so much thinking big as thinking wide.