Optimism vs. pessimism on America's future

In recent months, Al Fin has become a favorite blog of mine; a prolific blogger, he focuses on scientific and technical advances, as well as the occasional downbeat post on some worrisome trend or another, and what these mean for the future of the U.S. and the world. As he demonstrates on a daily basis, we have great cause for optimism in the economy, medicine, energy, longevity, the environment, and so on. Anyone who finds Ray Kurzweil's vision of the future convincing will find his blog a good exposition of the details.

The pessimistic view of the future may perhaps be illustrated by a comment on a previous post of mine:

Spend the money. Spend it and buy something because the government is going to get their hands on your savings. (I suggest purchasing firearms, land in a rural, white state and buying items that will increase your self-sufficiency, etc...) It will be called a "One Time Tax" but it will happen on a regular basis. Just wait. The money, I mean our money, will be used to support degenerate minorities and other "populations at risk." I'd like to be wrong about this but here is just the tip of the iceberg: [links to American Renaissance]
We are going to be supporting indigent, useless blacks and hispanics. The process has already begun.

We will not, of course, be able to decide which view is correct in the course of a blog post.

Writing in Prospect, Michael Lind states:

Anyone who reads the serious press about the condition of the US might be excused for believing that the country is headed towards a series of deep crises.

He goes on to show why he doesn't believe it true.

However, he also goes to some length to explain why he thinks that concerns about America's racial makeup, in particular the concern that whites will become a minority, are misplaced, wrong even. He accomplishes this with some verbal sleight-of-hand, by categorizing Hispanics as "white", and by citing relatively high rates of intermarriage, and concludes that "whites" will not become a minority.

If you put these trends together, you get a mega-trend that is the opposite of the conventional wisdom: when the most recent, yet-to-be-assimilated immigrants are factored out, the long-term trend in the US is towards less racial, cultural and linguistic diversity. There are some causes for concern, notably the possibility that the bipolar white/non-white system will give way to a black/non-black system, with blacks excluded from an informal social definition of "whiteness" that includes Hispanics and Asians. Nonetheless, the melting pot, which blends previously disparate groups into a single group, is still working in the US. In the 20th century, the melting pot turned once-distinct Anglo-Americans, Germans, Irish, Poles, Greeks, Jews, Italians and Lebanese into boringly similar "non-Hispanic whites." In this century, the American melting pot will blend most of today's old and new racial groups into a single English-speaking American cultural majority of mixed, mostly European ancestry.

Maybe, but given Hispanics' strong ethnic self-identity; the fact that, since most of them are from Mexico, and more Indian than white; that having so many from one country, a country with revanchist tendencies toward the U.S.; and that legal immigration and multiculturalism are rapidly eroding America's sense of itself as a white, European, and English-speaking nation, I am not so sanguine.

In my opinion, the greatest existential risk for this nation, and indeed for the world, the risk that might prevent a magnificent future almost beyond imagination, is the possibility of a partial or complete dissolution of the United States.

To prevent that, illegal immigration must be stopped, and legal immigration severely curtailed. We wouldn't be close to being out of the woods if those things were to happen, but if they don't, the future could be pretty grim.