FLORENCE, Italy — At the recent annual meetings of the American Economic Association, there was widespread pessimism about the future of the United States. "The age of American predominance is over," declared one economist. "The U.S. should brace for social unrest amid blame over who was responsible for squandering global primacy," said another.

We have heard this story many times before, not only in the U.S., but in other places as well. George Dangerfield's controversial history, "The Strange Death of Liberal England," describes his country's sudden decline at the peak of its power at the turn of the last century. The world everyone knew simply and inexplicably seemed to disappear. Many Americans — think of the tea party, for example — fear that something similar is happening to their own country. Or that it has already happened.

Dangerfield based his diagnosis on a cross-section of institutions, politics and personalities, set against the bitter class warfare of the time. Americans, however, have generally been averse to class warfare. True, the U.S. has been home to a rigid, albeit comparably fluid, class structure ever since its founding. But Americans just don't like to talk about it, even when they are whining about the follies of the "elite." Nearly all Americans, apart from the richest and poorest, define themselves as "middle class." Such remains America's democratic ethos.