Some time ago, The Atlantic's James Fallows wrote a reasoned, detailed and agnostic-to-hopeful assessment of the perception that the United States might be entering its long-anticipated decline. Fallows concluded that the country has ample economic and cultural resources; that its fatal flaw might be the clunky democratic machinery bequeathed by the too-hard-to-amend Constitution; but that we had muddled through that difficulty in the past and might continue to do so (my take