The Times's Gerard Baker finds he's one of the odd men out at the brainstorming sessions in Aspen:
The air's thin up there but the main reason I found myself gasping was not lack of oxygen but psychic shock at the way in which in these gabfests the entire canon of leftist orthodoxies is, for the most part, simply assumed as factual starting points for discussion, not arguments for debate.
Ross Douthat, who's also taking part, went along to a screening of Al Gore's documentary:
I ... found it almost entirely convincing, but then again I was already convinced that global warming is happening (as, I suspect, are most of the people who will see the movie). What I wanted, and what the film didn't offer, was more talk about what we can actually do about it. This is where the rubber meets the road (quite literally), and Gore only devoted about five minutes of a ninety-minute movie to the subject - and he didn't actually take on the arguments of those, like Robert Samuelson ... who argue that warming is real but that we don't yet know how to stop it.
Back to Baker. His pick of the events so far was the crystal ball talk by Juan Enriquez, author of The Untied States of America:
His thesis is that, all over the world nations that we assumed would last for ever have been breaking up... And he wonders why we should all believe the US will really be different. It's not just growing Hispanic separatism he cites but the status of Native Americans and the sort of growing economic and social disparities that increasingly characterise the country.
He overstates the case, of course. But it's certainly a useful jolt to the natural tendency to assume that what has been always will be. And in one of those fabulous statistics you really wish you'd uncovered yourself he points out that no president in American history has been born and buried under the same flag. The current stretch of almost 50 years without adding states is the longest in US history. Who's to say that the next change won't be fewer stars on the flag rather than more?