American exceptionalism and our bleak future

I've been thinking of writing a post on the vision that conservatives (abetted by ineffective Democrats) have for our country.  The vision being expressed by the current budget and policy battles where we can't provide for our seniors, we can't provide healthcare for our citizens, we can't maintain our infrastructure.  Our only purpose is to prop up the business community, end regulation, lower taxes, and everyone looks out only for himself.

Hunter posted an article that says everything I've been thinking.

One of the more striking characteristics of the "new" Republican agenda (or the agenda of the conservative movement, or Tea Party movement, or whatever they prefer to call themselves) is how unrelentingly negative it is. Depressingly, ploddingly negative; America is simultaneously the best and greatest country in the world, as blanket assertion, and a nation on a slow death march towards insolvency and irrelevance. America must make sacrifices, goes the refrain, but every one of the sacrifices seems to involve retracting a past long-term success; America must not (something), is the defining chant, where (something) is any number of things that other countries can successfully do and have done, but America cannot, or an even larger list of somethings that America used to do, and quite competently, but America can do no longer.

Other industrialized nations can provide their citizens with better access to healthcare; we simply cannot, and you are a fool for even bringing it up. Other nations can, say, establish warning systems for tsunamis, or volcanos, or hurricanes; America must tighten its belt, and that meager, economically trivial ounce of prevention is considered fat that should obviously be trimmed, so that America-the-entity can get back to its fighting weight. Past-America could provide at least some modest layer of security to prevent its citizens from descending into destitution in old age; we in this day cannot. Past-America could pursue scientific discoveries as a matter of national pride, even land mankind on an entirely other world; we cannot. Past-America was a haven of invention and technology that shook the world and changed the course of history countless times: whatever attributes made it such a place we cannot quite determine now, much less replicate. Public art is decadent. Public education is an infringement. Public works are for other times, never now.
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It is a staggeringly bleak vision. The notion that other free countries can do hosts of things that America, as blanket presumption, can no longer do should be the stuff of nightmares for any believer in American exceptionalism. Today believers in American exceptionalism seem to believe America is exceptional in the inverse way: America is the only country that cannot succeed at what other nations might be able to do. Healthcare, again, seems the most pressing example, though it seems Social Security is the next front on the war on past-America.
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We are told all the things America cannot do. We have yet to be told any vision of what we might still be able to do, or what hopes we should still retain, or why our children will be better off than we were, or why we ourselves will be better off than we were a scant few decades ago. Perhaps the very climate of the world will have changed, and the sky will be hotter, or the storms will be bigger, but none of those are things we can do anything about. Perhaps there will be nuclear disasters, or oil spills, or epidemics, or perhaps a city here or a city there will be leveled by some unforeseen catastrophe; we can be assured of it, in fact, but none of those things are things we can expect to respond to better next time than this time. Those are not, we are told, the tasks of a nation.

Check it out.  It's the vision our current Republican leaders have for us.  And unless we start fighting back effectively, it will be the epitaph of our country.