It s 1968 All Over Again by Victor Davis Hanson
Nigh a one-half-century ago, in 1968, the United States seemed to be falling apart.
The Vietnam War, a bitter and shut presidential election, antiwar protests, racial riots, political assassinations, terrorism and a recession looming on the horizon left the country divided between a loud radical minority and a silent conservative bulk.
The United States avoided a civil war. But America suffered a collective psychological depression, ceremonious unrest, defeat in Vietnam and assorted disasters for the adjacent decade – until the election of a in one case-polarizing Ronald Reagan ushered in five consecutive presidential terms of relative bipartisan calm and prosperity from 1981 to 2001.
It appears as if 2017 might be some other 1968. Contempo traumatic hurricanes seem to reflect the country's man turmoil.
After the polarizing Obama presidency and the contested election of Donald Trump, the country is once again split in two.
But this time the divide is far deeper, both ideologically and geographically – and more fifty/fifty, with the two liberal coasts pitted against red-country America in between.
Century-former mute stone statues are torn down in the dead of dark, apparently on the theory that by attacking the Confederate dead, the lives of the living might meliorate.
All the erstwhile standbys of American life seem to be eroding. The National Football League is imploding equally information technology devolves into a political circus. Multimillionaire players refuse to stand for the national canticle, turning off millions of fans whose former loyalties paid their salaries.
Politics – or rather a progressive hatred of the provocative Donald Trump – permeates nearly every nook and cranny of popular culture.
The new fidelity of the media, late-night boob tube, stand-upward comedy, Hollywood, professional sports and universities is committed to liberal sermonizing. Politically right obscenity and vulgarity among celebrities and entertainers is a substitute for talent, fifty-fifty as Hollywood is wracked by sexual harassment scandals and other perversities.
The smears "racist," "fascist," "white privilege" and "Nazi" – similar "commie" of the 1950s – are then overused as to become meaningless. In that location is now less complimentary speech on campus than during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s.
As was the case in 1968, the world abroad is too falling apart.
The European Wedlock, model of the future, is unraveling. The Eu has been paralyzed by the go out of Slap-up U.k., the split between Spain and Catalonia, the bankruptcy of Mediterranean nation members, insidious terrorist attacks in major European cities and the onslaught of millions of immigrants – mostly young, male person and Muslim – from the war-torn Middle East. Frg is in one case over again condign imperious, but this time insidiously by means other than artillery.
The failed country of North Korea claims that it has nuclear-tipped missiles capable of reaching America'due south Due west Coast – and apparently wants some sort of ransom not to launch them.
Iran is likely to follow the Democratic people's republic of korea nuclear trajectory. In the meantime, its new Shiite hegemony in the Heart E is feeding on the carcasses of Syria and Iraq.
Is the chaos of 2017 a catharsis – a necessary and long overdue purge of dangerous and neglected pathologies? Volition the bedlam within the Us descend into more nihilism, or offer a remedy to the condition quo that had divided and almost bankrupted the state?
Is the trouble too much democracy, equally the volatile and fickle mob runs roughshod over establishment experts and experienced bureaucrats? Or is the crisis too lilliputian democracy, every bit populists strive to dethrone a scandal-plagued, anti-democratic, incompetent and overrated entrenched elite?
Neither traditional political party has any answers.
Democrats are being overwhelmed by the identity politics and socialism of progressives. Republicans are torn asunder between upstart populist nationalists and the calcified institution status quo. Yet for all the social instability and media hysteria, life in the United States quietly seems to exist getting better.
The economy is growing. Unemployment and inflation remain low. The stock market and middle-form incomes are up.
Business organisation and consumer confidence are high. Corporate profits are up. Energy production has expanded. The border with United mexican states is being enforced.
Is the instability less a symptom that America is falling apart and more a sign that the loud conventional wisdom of the past – about the benefits of a globalized economic system, the insignificance of national borders and the importance of identity politics – is drawing to a close, forth with the careers of those who profited from information technology?
In the by, any crisis that did non destroy the United States ended up making information technology stronger. But for now, the fight grows over which is more toxic — the chronic statist malady that was eating abroad the country, or the new populist medicine deemed necessary to cure it.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and an author. Email him at author@victorhanson.com.
Source: https://www.onlineathens.com/opinion/2017-10-12/hanson-it-s-1968-all-over-again
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