Introduction

Despite a long involvement with public life, I have read very few books by public officials, past or present. Judging by the ones I have read, many are written to justify the authors’ actions or, worse, to settle personal scores. Others aim to embellish the authors’ role or proximity to major events, and still others are thinly veiled exercises in self-advertisement.

The typical politician’s book tends to be all about “the author,” and narcissism always puts me off. Someone once called one of Churchill’s books “autobiography disguised as a history of the universe.”¹ But at least Churchill had a fabulous life full of genuine and diverse accomplishments. As far as I can tell, I haven’t cheated myself much by skipping the last couple thousand titles by senators, presidents, or former thises and thats.

So if you’re looking for a book full of self-revelation and tales of a tortured childhood, try the next shelf. What follows is most determinedly not about me because, frankly, I’m not that interesting. I’ve led a boringly typical postwar American life, which is to say I’m among the luckiest people who ever walked the earth.

Plus, I dislike the self-absorption that has characterized my generation. We Baby Boomers have always confused our numbers with our importance. Landon Jones, in his landmark book on the Baby Boomer generation, Great Expectations, called us “the kids the war had been fought for.” We were frequently coddled and taught how special we were. We were destined to be the center of attention throughout our lives, not because we deserved to be but merely because there were so many of us. We thought we invented sex, discovered nature, and conquered racism single-handedly. Retailers catered to our changing tastes and designed their advertising campaigns around us.

And as a generation of disproportionate size, our equally disproportionate number of reckless decisions brought our country to a fiscal crisis. The men and women who licked the Great Depression and won World War II have been dubbed the “Greatest Generation.” But as I remarked in a 2009 commencement speech at Butler University, no one will ever hang such a moniker on the Baby Boomers. “As a group, we have been self-centered, self-absorbed, self-indulgent and all too often just plain selfish,”² I said. “[W]e voted ourselves increasing levels of Social Security pensions and Medicare health benefits, but never summoned the political maturity to put those programs on anything resembling a sound actuarial foundation.” To underscore the importance of reversing these decisions and putting the country on sounder footing, I told the graduating class that my generation’s “parents scrimped and saved to provide us better living standards than theirs. We borrowed and splurged.... It’s been a blast. Good luck cleaning up after us.” When my contemporaries on the faculty scowled and the student body rose in a standing ovation, I knew I had gotten my point across.

So I wouldn’t embarrass myself or try to pick your pocket by writing a book about myself. All the words here are my own, so that much is personal, and I sometimes illustrate a point with a fact or anecdote drawn from my personal experience as governor of Indiana. But as proud as I am of what we Hoosiers have accomplished, I learned long ago that telling people about your home state is like showing people your home movies: the visitors trapped on the couch are only pretending to be interested.

One more thing you won’t find much of in these pages is labels. In seven years of elective politics I have never used the c-word (conservative) to define what my administration proposed to do, or the l-word (liberal) to disparage someone else’s ideas. For one thing, these terms have been bent out of their original meaning. A “liberal,” for most of history, was a person who defended freedom against the power of government, not, as today, someone who seeks to subjugate individual liberty to state control. What’s more, most of the citizens I encounter don’t see the world through doctrinaire eyes. As I travel through Indiana, I almost never stay in hotels. Rather, I find a family with a spare bedroom or a free pull-out couch willing to put me up for the night. I enjoy the unhurried and unvarnished conversations around the kitchen table, and I’ve found that the people I meet don’t typically identify with one particular political ideology. Instead, they are looking for workable solutions to pressing problems affecting their families and communities.

But, most important, labels often divide Americans into warring camps. This obscures the common threats we face and makes it more difficult to solve national problems. The nation doesn’t need yet another purple political polemic, at least not from me.

So, personal anecdotes, details about Indiana, and discussions of political ideology are included here only where they are necessary to underscore my larger point: for the first time in my life, I am desperately alarmed about the condition and direction of the American republic. What recently seemed a secure, ever more prosperous, internationally dominant nation is now endangered in a way it never has been before. In the dark days of the cold war, Soviet nuclear confrontation posed a grave danger. During the Civil War the country fractured and fought itself. And during the Revolution and immediately afterward, the infant nation was at risk of disintegrating. But today the danger stems from a central element of our free system. As a people, we have discovered the ability to vote ourselves largesse from the federal treasury in such vast sums that we are destroying our own chances at prosperity. The level of government spending we are engaging in may soon leave us with a defunct, bankrupt, destitute economy. If we don’t find a way to restore the goose to good health, we will soon run out of golden eggs.

The danger here is far greater than simple material well-being. The power of free institutions has always rested on their ability to produce prosperity, which in turn empowers free peoples to engage in personal and creative pursuits in every field ranging from business to charity to the arts. Our prosperity has enabled our society to become not only the wealthiest in the world, but also the fairest, most creative, and most generous the world has ever known. It has also been able to fund a military capacity unmatched anywhere, which has reinforced our position of global leadership. We are not only a free people; we are a strong country. This broad success has spurred other peoples to seek free institutions of their own.

At the end of the cold war, the natural superiority of free systems seemed so assured that the highly respected Francis Fukuyama famously published a book titled The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that the age-old struggle between freedom and oppression was largely over. Freedom won, and the world would never look back.

Unfortunately, that proved to be too optimistic. Today, our system of governance is being challenged by China and other authoritarian cultures that are generating far faster economic growth than anything we seem capable of. Tyrants have long wanted to have their cake and eat it, too—to plunder economies that would somehow thrive despite political and economic oppression. But the success of the United States seemed to prove that reaching the highest levels of prosperity was possible only through the use of free economic and political institutions; that to be rich, a people first needed to be free. That belief led leaders of other nations to admire and seek to emulate our system despite a natural inclination toward control.

Now the fundamental belief in free systems is being called into question. Our recent financial collapse has accelerated phenomena that have been growing for decades, but that were masked by the almost unbroken prosperity of the quarter century between the Reagan Recovery in 1983 and the 2008 meltdown. Burgeoning government at every level, from federal to township, has been financed at an alarming rate by borrowed money. A miserably underperforming public school system is now taking its inevitable toll on our society and producing a workforce woefully unprepared to compete with those of other countries and woefully ignorant of the duties and requirements of citizenship in a free society.

History teaches us that all national greatness is temporary. Every great civilization—from the Roman Empire to the British Empire—has eventually collapsed. Americans have grown complacent in their position of dominance, but the term “the American Century” suggests how relatively brief this period of dominance has been. An ancient Roman would not have been impressed by a less-than-one-hundred-year run on top.

Decline and fall are only occasionally foreseen by those en route to those destinations, and still less often forestalled by forceful and timely action. Denial of reality is a powerful human impulse, as is the tendency to mistake the status quo for the natural and inevitable order of things.

Today’s American suffers from a diminished sense of his own national history and, too often, a profound ignorance of the history of other nations and civilizations. He probably has even less awareness than a Victorian Brit, a sixteenth-century Spaniard, or even a fifth-century Roman that the world is always subject to a fundamental shakeup. What’s more, he has likely not given any thought to the fact that our way of governing ourselves remains an anomalous and unproven experiment in the eyes of history. Sages throughout time have doubted that, to paraphrase Lincoln, a government conceived in liberty can long endure.

Our Founding Fathers knew how long the odds were against their experiment. They worried to their dying days that their work would be undone by the excesses to which democracies might be prone, or by an atrophy of the character traits—self-discipline, self-reliance, a “don’t tread on me” insistence on individual liberty—that gave birth to our independence and freedom in the first place. Subsequent generations, especially Lincoln’s, feared a dying out of the “mystic chords of memory,” the historical knowledge and appreciation of the precious uniqueness of America.

Now evidence abounds that we have reached the point that centuries of skeptics predicted. The overpromising of politicians, catering to the immediate wants of their constituents, has stacked up obligations far beyond our government’s ability to afford them. A growing near-majority of citizens is now dependent on government for a substantial percentage of their livelihood. Increasingly, the burdens of a growing public sector are paid for by a dwindling percentage of the population. It is now reaching the point where society’s ability to generate new wealth is being threatened and the non-payers have nothing to lose by demanding still more from their richer neighbors.

Meanwhile, large majorities of Americans are clueless, or even badly mistaken, about their own history and the history of past fallen empires. Encouraged on every side to think of themselves as victims of an unfair system and their country as nothing special, they can quite logically react to economic adversity not with a bootstraps resolve but with self-pity and a search for villains. The republican virtues that the Founders saw as indispensable to liberty’s preservation appear to be in short supply just when we need them most.

Consequently, we have amassed a ruinous amount of national debt, current and committed, mathematically beyond the capacity of any economy to pay. This is a survival-level threat to the America we have known. Left unaddressed much longer, it will permanently hobble the prosperity engine that has made us the world’s great power and exemplar. It will undermine the uniquely American promise of upward mobility for all and compromise our government’s ability to fulfill its most important responsibility: national security and the physical safety of Americans.

If this picture seems hyperbolic, or if America’s subsiding (or plummeting) into a position of parity or secondary world importance is acceptable to you, then see the cashier for a refund for this book. But if you accept that democracy is always fragile and despotism always in the wings, and that our drift into debt and dependency, accelerated by the recent surge of statism, is dragging us into the great dismal swamp of economic stagnation and personal subservience, read on.

If you do grasp our dilemma, and it bothers you, then here’s an important preview: The handwringing does stop. I devoutly believe there is a route to renewal, a way to reconstruct both our economy and an ethic of citizenship that will preserve both prosperity and liberty. There are strong grounds for believing that Americans will summon the resolve necessary to pull this off. I’ve said I’m not about to write an autobiography; I’m not into writing obituaries, either.

Back when American students learned history, every student knew how Benjamin Franklin responded when asked, after finishing his work at the Constitutional Convention, what sort of government the country was to have: “A republic, if you can keep it.” Decisions of the next few years will answer Mr. Franklin’s implied question.