As a holiday meditation, consider that many of the things that fill people with understandable fear for our national future – polarization, extremism, radicalization, mutual incomprehension across cultural and moral and theological chasms – are also in their own way signs of national vitality. It’s good that so many people from so many different backgrounds still find the American future worth fighting over. It’s potentially good that freaks, weirdos and eccentrics have an increasing share in our politics alongside levelheaded moderates. It’s potentially good that far right and further left are both seeking reimaginings of the national narrative, incompatible as those imaginings may seem. We face a difficult situation in the world and a bad, late-imperial-seeming choice in November — but many of our derangements are also indicators of a heathy discontent with the comfortable decadence of developed societies. From multiple perspectives the American experiment appears at risk — but better to be at risk than to be settled, torpid, stagnant.
Maybe these are just the things you tell yourself when you’ve just had a fifth child. But I think there’s a good chance, a very good chance, that my children will inherit an America quite different from any of our past golden or silver ages, but still the best place to be born and live and flourish in this age of the world.
Here is the link.
