A decade ago, it was easy to believe US identity was a settled question. Now, as our institutions acquiesce to barbarism, the US\u2019s promise has been traded for chaos<\/p>\n
Making America great again was never a promise Donald Trump could deliver on, nor one that he intended to. That said, he has undoubtedly thrust the US back into history \u2060\u2013 and not just through his assault, in recent days, on the global economic order.<\/p>\n
About 50 years ago, the tumults of the late 1960s and early 1970s began giving way to a quietude that would carry us through the end of the cold war. Tested as we may have been by conflict, scandals and crises economic and not, we entered this new century \u2060\u2013 and met the uncertainties of a new world we\u2019d forced into being \u2060\u2013 surer of ourselves than ever before. The towers fell, yes, but the US\u2019s sense of purpose was as much of a settled fact in the world as American power. The American people were divided, true, but for all but an impertinent and implacable few, the major questions of American identity had been resolved. The meaning of American values, the contents of the American dream, the members, in good standing, of American society \u2060\u2013 these things were known and known so deeply, we supposed, that they hardly needed articulation.<\/p>\n
Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A decade ago, it was easy to believe US identity was a settled question. Now, as our institutions acquiesce to barbarism, the US\u2019s promise has been traded for chaos Making America great again was never a promise Donald Trump could deliver on, nor one that he intended to. That said, he has undoubtedly thrust the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38343\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}