Quietly Getting Better

from Victor Davis Hanson at National Review, It’s 1968 All Over Again:

The smears “racist,” “fascist,” “white privilege,” and “Nazi” — like “Commie” of the 1950s — are so overused as to become meaningless. There is now less free speech on campus than during the McCarthy era of the early 1950s.

Is the chaos of 2017 a catharsis — a necessary and long overdue purge of dangerous and neglected pathologies? Will the bedlam within the United States descend into more nihilism or offer a remedy to the status quo that had divided and nearly bankrupted the country?

Is the problem too much democracy, as the volatile and fickle mob runs roughshod over establishment experts and experienced bureaucrats? Or is the crisis too little democracy, as populists strive to dethrone a scandal-plagued, anti-democratic, incompetent, and overrated entrenched elite?

Neither traditional political party has any answers. Democrats are being overwhelmed by the identity politics and socialism of progressives. Republicans are torn asunder between upstart populist nationalists and the calcified establishment status quo.

Yet for all the social instability and media hysteria, life in the United States quietly seems to be getting better.

HKO

We have a priority. Existential security comes first, economic stability second, and social justice third.  Perhaps the tragic flaw of the Democrats is that their priority mismatches the voters.  the social unrest of the 1960’s was largely a by product of national security (Viet Nam was not the threat of WWII), and  solid growing economy in a world still recovering from WW II. Perhaps the voters are not feeling as secure and stable as they need to feel to make social justice the priority they want it to be.