cover image The Day Before Yesterday: Reconsidering America's Past, Rediscovering the Present

The Day Before Yesterday: Reconsidering America's Past, Rediscovering the Present

Michael Elliott. Simon & Schuster, $23.5 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-684-80991-5

Elliott--an Englishman living in the U.S. since the early 1970s, who covered Washington for the Economist and is now editor of Newsweek International--asks: Why do Americans whine so much about the state of the nation and its economy? His answer is that by not understanding their recent past, they have created an impossible illusion about the way things should be. Americans, he argues, look at the so-called Golden Age, the decade or so following WWII, as the norm, with the domestic economy booming and the U.S. dominating the world. Elliott maintains, with a decade-by-decade analysis of the years since 1945, that ""the messy, fragmented Babel of a place"" that America is today ""is the way America has usually been."" The Golden Age created an educated middle class that was the envy of the world, but it also made redundant the low-skilled, high-paid working class that made such a time possible. Those left behind found scapegoats: blacks in the '70s, foreign investments in America in the '80s, immigrants in the '90s. But Elliott ends on a guardedly optimistic note. He sees a new America taking shape. A period of ""traumatic change in family life"" is ending. A ""vibrant corporate sector and an expanding world economy"" can provide a shared prosperity that may once again unite the country. The trick is not to try to do the impossible, to recreate the myth of the '50s. The book is a long editorial, an op-ed piece run wild, but it is snappingly and engagingly written. (July)