New norms and beliefs, new values for what is admired and disdained, arise. When moral convulsions recede, the national consciousness is transformed. That has left us a broken, alienated society caught in a distrust doom loop. We had a chance, in crisis, to pull together as a nation and build trust. It is an account of how, under the stresses of 2020, American institutions and the American social order crumbled and were revealed as more untrustworthy still. This is an account of how, over the past few decades, America became a more untrustworthy society. When people in a society lose faith or trust in their institutions and in each other, the nation collapses. When people in a church lose faith or trust in God, the church collapses. Social trust is a measure of the moral quality of a society-of whether the people and institutions in it are trustworthy, whether they keep their promises and work for the common good. This essay is an account of the convulsion that brought us to this fateful moment. Trump is the final instrument of this crisis, but the conditions that brought him to power and make him so dangerous at this moment were decades in the making, and those conditions will not disappear if he is defeated.įrom the July/August 2020 issue: History will judge the complicit Finally, he threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our democracy in November and incite a vicious national conflagration that would leave us a charred and shattered nation. Unable to behave responsibly, unable to protect himself from COVID-19, unable to even tell the country the truth about his own medical condition, he undermines the basic credibility of the government and arouses the suspicion that every word and act that surrounds him is a lie and a fraud. Donald Trump is in the process of shredding every norm of decent behavior and wrecking every institution he touches. Now, as we enter the final month of the election, this period of convulsion careens toward its climax. They flooded the ravines that had opened up in American society and exposed every flaw. They did not cause the moral convulsion, but they accelerated every trend. The events of 2020-the coronavirus pandemic the killing of George Floyd militias, social-media mobs, and urban unrest-were like hurricanes that hit in the middle of that earthquake. Our moment of moral convulsion began somewhere around the mid-2010s, with the rise of a range of outsider groups: the white nationalists who helped bring Donald Trump to power the young socialists who upended the neoliberal consensus and brought us Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez activist students on campus the Black Lives Matter movement, which rose to prominence after the killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice. In 1981, Huntington predicted that the next moral convulsion would hit America around the second or third decade of the 21st century-that is, right about now. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion.
Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation.
Contempt for established power is intense.Ī highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. People feel disgusted by the state of society. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s and the social-protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s. The late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion.
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