We are entering, I believe, a new age of insecurity.
Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it.
Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage? What do we mean when we speak of a “good society”?
What we have been watching these past decades is the steady shifting of public responsibility onto the private sector to no discernible collective advantage.
If we have learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences.