The 2010s Were the End of Normal By Michiko Kakutani, NY Times Opinion

[Beringia]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/27/opinion/sunday/2010s-america-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

By Michiko Kakutani, a former book critic for The Times. 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism

Dec. 27, 2019

How social media, the Great Recession and Donald Trump combined to bring out the ‘indigenous American berserk.’


At the same time, Donald Trump remains a uniquely American phenomenon. Although the United States was founded on the Enlightenment values of reason, liberty and progress, there has long been another strain of thinking at work beneath the surface — what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk,” and the historian Richard Hofstadter famously described as “the paranoid style.”

It’s an outlook characterized by a sense of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” Hofstadter wrote in his 1964 essay, and focused on perceived threats to “a nation, a culture, a way of life.” Its language is apocalyptic (Mr. Trump’s “American carnage” is a perfect example); its point of view, extremist. It regards its opponents as evil and ubiquitous, while portraying itself, in Hofstadter’s words, as “manning the barricades of civilization.”

The “paranoid style,” Hofstadter observed, tends to occur in “episodic waves.” The modern right wing, he wrote, feels dispossessed: “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it.” In their view, “the old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals,” and national independence has been “destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen seated at the very centers of American power.”

In his 2018 book “The Soul of America,” the historian Jon Meacham also wrote about the cycles of hope and fear in American history, emphasizing the role that presidents play in setting a tone for the country and defining — or undermining — its founding ideals. He wrote about presidents who have worked to unify the country and appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature,” and those who have courted discord and division.

In July 2018, Kakutani published a book criticizing the Trump administration titled The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

[murielm99]

1. I remember reading that Hofstadter

essay years ago. It stuck with me.

[targetpractice]

2. I discovered it shortly after the 2000 election...

...About the same time I joined DU. It stuck with me, too. I had no idea it was written in 1964... very prescient.

[Aristus]

3. I would argue that September 11th, 2001 was the end of normal.

We became an angry, bitter, violent, merciless, thoughtless, aggressive nation on that day. We have seen mild, intermittent periods of improvement (which gave us two terms of Barack Obama), but other than that, we are basically a pariah nation.