The American experiment is self-destructing — the overheated, cracked beakers leaking corrosive toxins and belching noxious fumes.
Thinkers on the left and right view the meltdown with alarm. The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner asks bleakly, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? The National Review's Jonah Goldberg grieves that “tribalism, populism, nationalism, and identity politics” are destroying democracy. In his upcoming book America, Compromised, the scholar, attorney, and activist Lawrence Lessig explores institutional corruption in Congress, finance, the media, academe, and the law. And former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in Fascism: A Warning, writes: “If we think of fascism as a wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab.” Now add to these jeremiads Steven Brill's Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall — and Those Fighting to Reverse It.
Read Full Article »
