Historian Walter Russell Mead
writes, in
The American Interest, about the troubled 2016 political race and its roots in a fragmenting American consensus.
A Trump-Clinton campaign will be one of the ugliest—and most unpredictable—in American history. November will not be the end of the bitterness, the division, and the frustration; the next President of the United States will have a difficult job. The consequences of unsolved problems will proliferate, the international challenges will become sharper, and public unhappiness with the status quo will likely continue to rise. Political passions will run high, and the polarization will run deep.
I am moved to quote Irish poet W. B. Yeats:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Very timely, for a work written at the end of World War I. Perhaps things are often this messy.
