The changes of the early seventies marked a long-term Democratic shift in power from the white working class to the college-educated and minorities. It took several decades, but the two parties just about traded places. By the turn of the millennium, the Democrats were becoming the home of affluent professionals, while the Republicans were starting

Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.”

But self-government starts in ourselves. The most basic way Americans can acquire what Tocqueville called “habits of the heart” is by killing their Twitter or Facebook accounts and spending time in the physical presence of other Americans who don’t look or talk or think like them. Study after study shows that antagonistic groups begin to lose their

What is the narrative of Just America? It sees American society not as mixed and fluid, ever more so through time, but as a fixed hierarchy, like a caste system. (Caste is the title of one of the most popular books of Just America; two others are The New Jim Crow and Stamped from the Beginning.) In the words of William Faulkner, for Just America, “

The destruction of a shared reality does more damage than economic decline or impeachable acts.

Cheap, blatant, and readily accessible, American pop culture was made for the world’s first leisured masses. It’s almost designed to offend snobs, which is why cultural anti-Americanism tends to take root in the traditional upper ranks of societies. No working-class Englishman ever despised Americans as much as Graham Greene and John le Carré, both

Related to this unsubtlety is our lack of gravity—the disregard for limits and sense of eternal possibility in new things. We untether, flit, and make ourselves over as if nothing is too fixed or solid for change. We are world-class inventors, especially of ourselves. At the same time, we take pride in ordinariness and are suspicious of airs, espec

He died in 1987, but it took another twenty-six years for him to receive his due, when President Obama bestowed the Medal of Freedom on the late Bayard Rustin.

At the heart of our divisions is almost half a century of rising inequality and declining social mobility. Americans tolerate more economic inequality than citizens of other modern democracies: if anyone can become anything, today’s unequal results are fair and might well change tomorrow. That was never completely true, but now it’s plainly false.