How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
September 2011
On Sale: September 5, 2011
400 pages ISBN: 0374288909 EAN: 9780374288907 Kindle: B0050IET72 Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
America has a huge problem. It faces four major challenges,
on which its future depends, and it is failing to meet them.
In That Used to Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman, one of our most
influential columnists, and Michael Mandelbaum, one of our
leading foreign policy thinkers, analyze those
challenges—globalization, the revolution in information
technology, the nation’s chronic deficits, and its pattern
of energy consumption—and spell out what we need to do now
to rediscover America and rise to this moment.
They explain how the end of the cold war blinded the nation
to the need to address these issues. They show how our
history, when properly understood, provides the key to
addressing them, and explain how the paralysis of our
political system and the erosion of key American values have
made it impossible for us to carry out the policies the
country needs. They offer a way out of the trap into which
the country has fallen, which includes the rediscovery of
some of our most valuable traditions and the creation of a
new, third-party movement. That Used to Be Us is both a
searching exploration of the American condition today and a
rousing manifesto for American renewal.
“As we were writing this book,” Friedman and Mandelbaum
explain, “we found that when we shared the title with
people, they would often nod ruefully and ask: ‘But does it
have a happy ending?’ Our answer is that we can write a
happy ending, but it is up to the country—to all of us—to
determine whether it is fiction or nonfiction. We need to
study harder, save more, spend less, invest wisely, and get
back to the formula that made us successful as a country in
every previous historical turn. What we need is not novel or
foreign, but values, priorities, and practices embedded in
our history and culture, applied time and again to propel us
forward as a country. That is all part of our past. That
used to be us and can be again—if we will it.”
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