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Students, homeowners, footballers and generals might all benefit from lowered expectations. But voters may not like it

In his early days as leader of the opposition, David Cameron circulated a summer reading list for his shadow ministers. Any such document for this holiday season would surely recommend Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World. Barbara Ehrenreich's book is a key text in the emerging new publishing genre of manuals for negative thinking, which argue that recent decades have encouraged unrealistic expectations of wealth, health and contentment. Others include Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy and You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up: A Love Story, which purports to be one of the first truly honest accounts of the irritations and compromises of a long relationship.

Apart from the possible relevance to the coalition of the last book's advice on getting along with potentially incompatible bedfellows, the reason that these texts may provide a philosophical underpinning for the Cameron-Clegg administration is that the prime minister seems to be embarked on a mission that riskily reverses about 50 years of political thinking and rhetoric.

Much shock was expressed this week at the suggestion from the universities minister, David Willetts, that school-leavers chasing sparse college slots might benefit from lowered expectations. But this message should not perhaps have been surprising, given that Cameron himself recently applied a similar damp cloth to national geo-political pride, arguing that the UK has long been a junior partner of the US and must accept this deputy's badge.

In American politics, the most grievous and ruinous charge a presidential candidate can face is "talking down the country", an allegation that retains a McCarthyite sting. For this reason, improbable levels of patriotism and optimism have been a central tactic of all the nation's most electable recent leaders: the two-term winners Reagan, Clinton and George W Bush and the landsliding Obama, all of whom ran and governed on variations of Reagan's "Morning in America" slogan.

It's true that the present incumbent, during his campaign, did hint at how tough the post-recession period might be, but these deflationary speeches were obliterated by his having become an embodiment of feel-good politics.

The gathering evidence of selfishness and self-obsession in human behaviour â€" from casual hostility in the streets to employees who expect work to be easy and brief â€" must also be the result of a belief that everything is possible for everyone. The huge casualties being suffered by the British armed forces can also be seen as a consequence of a military and political desire for the nation to fight above its weight.

Cameron's and Willetts's get-real language is partly a result of fiscal emergency â€" there isn't the cash to encourage aspiration â€" but there is also a sense, especially in Cameron, of a deeper desire to give the nation a reality check. He may be influenced in this direction by the fact that, for all his protestations about how much he loves coalition, the prime minister has lowered his own expectations â€" in the manner touted by his universities minister â€" from a landslide guaranteeing five years in power to a perilous compromise.

And, while books such as Ehrenreich's may question the triumphalist culture, that lesson seems unlikely to be learned by publishing itself. Don't expect to read a dust-jacket blurb on a trumpeted new novel that reads: "His first book was by far the best but he has to keep churning them out to pay off the wives." Indeed, ironically, whatever Ehrenreich brings out after Smile or Die will inevitably be billed as being even better and more relevant, whether it is or not.

The biggest difficulty for Cameron will be readjusting his terms of reference for a future election. Given that no one has ever won office by pledging to make the country poorer and more insignificant, he will have to become upbeat again, presumably using the line that the years of pain would now make possible years of gain. Intriguingly, his likeliest opponent, David Miliband, has already often questioned the PM's use of the phrase "broken Britain", in effect raising that American complaint of talking down the country and suggesting a future opposition line of attack against the government.

So, next time he goes before the electorate, David Cameron will be defending two bold experiments: not just the coalition but also the introduction of negative thinking to British politics.