The Tyranny of America's Great Expectations

On January 8th, the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens wrote a piece about American politics and how we look at Iraq. He cites cases of "the perfect becoming the enemy of the good", something that also troubles me.

While the op-ed is somewhat oversimplified, I was taken by these two paragraphs towards the end of the piece:

There is great virtue in the American way, which expects CEOs to perform on a quarterly basis, presidents and Congresses to reinvent politics in 100 days, generals to wipe out opponents in 100 hours without taking significant casualties, doctors to save life and limb every time, search engines to yield a million results in less than a second, and so on. There is also great virtue in the belief that what is bad can be made good, and that what is good can be made great, and that what is fractionally less than great is downright awful.

But these virtues can spawn vices. One is impatience. Another is a culture of chronic complaint. A third is the belief that every problem has a solution, that trial is possible without error, that risks must always be zero, that every inconvenience is an outrage, every setback a disaster and every mishap a plausible basis for a lawsuit.