Today I began to read Hard America, Soft America by Michael Barone. Borders puts this in the poli-sci section, though Barone says right away that the book is about how Americans live, not about how they vote. There are probably some left-right generalizations that could be made regarding Barone’s division of the Soft and Hard Americas, but that is not meant to be his main point.
So far, this is a great book. In brief, Barone classifies “Soft” America as the America that gives things to you; the America that makes life easier. Into this category would fall public schools, and even most private schools, colleges, and unversities, welfare-type programs, etc.–you get the idea. “Hard” America is the “real world,” competition, business, the bottom-line, industry–the “make it or break it” world which, in general, Americans are supposed to be ready to join after High School.
Barone begins by making the point that most high school graduates are not ready to enter Hard America:
For many years I have thought it one of the peculiar features of our country that we seem to produce incompetent eighteen-year-olds but remarkably competent thirty-year-olds.
Barone qualifies this, of course, since there are obviously exceptions to this rule. The tone of the book is further set here, after Barone has spent a little more time elaborating on what Hard and Soft America is:
There will naturally be differences about how much of American life should be Hard and how much Soft–something reasonable Americans will argue about forever. But as we consider those arguments I think we have to keep this in mind: Soft America lives off the productivity, creativity, and competence of Hard America, and we have the luxury of keeping parts of our society Soft only if we keep enough of it Hard.
