Editor’s note: Kurt Andersen, best-selling author and host of the radio program Studio 360, has turned his unflagging curiosity to the current economic crisis. He believes it is an opportunity to get the nation back on track. Part of the answer, Kurt suggests, lies in reconnecting to the amateur spirit that first helped create America. Regular contributor Marcia Stepanek spoke to 2009 PopTech speaker Kurt Anderson, whose talk we release today.

Radio host Kurt Andersen wrote in Reset, his 2009 book about America’s uncertain future, that the last 25 years of American life have been years in which Americans have been guilty of magical thinking – living too large, defining success as more of everything, instantly, and behaving, more or less, like spoiled children oblivious of their impact on the world. [“We (Baby Boomers) took Peter Pan too seriously; we took Bob Dylan’s lyrics too seriously,” Andersen told PopTech conferees last October in Camden (see podcast, below). “We committed to never growing up and we didn’t.” The 1980s – until the 2008 financial meltdown — “just kept going, and kept going, and kept going,” Andersen said.]

We are now, Andersen says, in a “reset moment” that presents a great opportunity “for getting ourselves and our nation back on track.” Sure, America has always moved back and forth between economic booms and busts and between the left and right politically. But this time is different, he says. “It’s a time when all of these cycles are shifting dramatically and simultaneously; when complacency is forced to end; when outdated structures are being inevitably and necessarily challenged, and when change is rapid and difficult to predict.”

Since speaking to PopTech and writing Reset in the thick of the 2008 financial meltdown, how does Andersen think the nation is faring so far in reset mode? I caught up with Andersen last week; what follows is an edited transcript of our conversation:

On last fall’s PopTech stage, you declared the 1980s era of hyper-excess to finally be over; indeed, some nine months later, here were are, still cleaning up after ourselves. Just today, President Obama signed into law the most sweeping financial overhaul since the Great Depression; BP oil spill compensation czar Kenneth Feinberg just told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that not everybody who files a claim against the oil company will be compensated for their losses. Are we, as a nation, getting on with setting a new course for ourselves, or do we still need to hit bottom – to fail even bigger – in order to bring about large-scale, mass reinvention?

ANDERSEN: It’s a good question. Having created this “reset” prism through which I now look at the news, I sort of ask myself that question every day or every week. Some days or weeks, I go, ‘Oh well, we are moving forward and actually are reconfiguring our ways of thinking about life and business in encouraging and heartening ways.’ And sometimes, I think ‘Ah, well maybe not so much.’ I guess I think that I’m more hopeful than not. I think that a couple or three years hence, we’ll look back and say, ‘You know? We didn’t shift 180 degrees and become a different place, but the idea that there is a role for shrewd, effective forms of regulation, for instance, has returned.’ There is now the idea out there that maximizing how much we earn is not synonymous with personal contentment. Those things have changed. What hasn’t changed since I started writing about this is that, I guess by now, I thought we might be ready for more of an ideological flux than we are seeing. I’m not one of those people who believe that the country is as brutally and rigidly and ferociously divided between left and right and all of that, as it sometimes seems. But I guess I was hopeful that out of the terror and flux of the financial meltdown, more people in positions of leadership and power in Washington and elsewhere would begin to abandon their old, tired, auto-pilot talking points. And that hasn’t happened as much as I would have liked. In fact, I find that the most shocking thing, I guess, is the absolute, party line-ness that still exists on things like financial reform and most other of the big pieces of legislation now working their way through the sausage factory.

Of course, it’s not the worst of times nor the best of times in Washington, but there you have some version of health care reform that may or may not do what you want it to do, and you have now some version of financial reform that may or may not do good or bad. So things are moving forward but it’s all still somewhat ambiguous. I try to be even-handed, and I don’t consider myself a party line Democrat, but when I see 39 of 40 Republicans and the Republican establishment simply refusing to play, that doesn’t seem like what ought to be happening if the reset were proceeding as one hoped that it would.