America is embedded in a world that is troubled by insidious parallel variants of the same structural problems — anti-immigrant fervor, political tribalism, racism, ethnic tension, authoritarianism and inequality — that led to a right-wing takeover of the federal government by Donald Trump.
The peculiarly American characteristics of the Trump years have blinded us to the spread of this radical disorder worldwide — even as some prescient scholars and analysts have seen the connections all along and have been trying to make the public aware of them.
According to the Stanford sociologists Michelle Jackson and David Grusky, there is a common thread to these seemingly disparate developments — what they call “the ubiquity of loss” — a condition the authors describe as a “late industrial experience, in short, increasingly one of omnipresent loss and decline.” CONTINUED
Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times