Another great UPHEAVAL
Congress is divided as seldom before. Donald J. Trump is remaking the profile of the presidency. The press is under attack. The notion of free speech on campus is under siege. By month’s end, serious questions will be raised about the independence, and perhaps even the survival, of the Federal Reserve Bank.
This is a period of unusual tension and tumult, of which President Trump is both cause and consequence. But so are the chasms between the political parties, and the even greater gap between the public and the political establishment.
Rarely has the prevailing ethos in the faculty lounge been so isolated from the parents who pay for college education, and never has the value of a college education been so questioned by so many with such fervor.
Indeed, not since the 1960s — perhaps since the 1930s — have so many of the governing assumptions and established institutions of the United States been under such stress and strain.
The 1930s, Stanford historian David M. Kennedy wrote, “tested the very fabric of American culture.” The 1960s, the Brown University historian James T. Patterson said, “unsettled much that Americans had taken for granted before then.”
Both statements apply without amendment to the second decade of the 21st century, when, according to a poll taken by KRC Research only two months ago, a record-high seven out of 10 Americans believe the country has a major civility problem.
The crisis of the 1930s was prompted by the Great Depression, when economic despair caused faith in capitalism to wane and appeal for communism to rise, at least in some blue-collar and intellectual circles. The crisis of the 1960s was as much one of credibility as content, as American leaders and their institutions struggled with civil rights, and young people rebelled against consumerism, sexism and the Vietnam War. Franklin D. Roosevelt saved capitalism. Lyndon B. Johnson was ambushed at Credibility Gap.
Just as there was no clear resolution to the American malaise in
1932, nor to the American upheaval of 1967, there is no clear path out of the turmoil and turbulence of this decade.