David Brooks

I read a book by Samuel Huntington, the late great political scientist from Harvard, and the subtitle of the book.

was the promise of disharmony.

And he argues that every couple decades, America goes through what he calls a moral convulsion, where people want to burn everything down, people get disgusted, social distrust collapses, a passionate generation comes on the scene, new form of communications technology.

He said this happens in the 1770s with the revolutionary period, happened in the 1830s with Andrew Jackson, populism in the 1890s, where you get these economic depressions, racial terrorism,

Mask, political corruption, poverty.

And it happened in the 1960s with bombings, assassinations and so on.

And writing in 1981, he says, you know, I don't know if I believe in these cycles, but if the cycle holds sometime around the second decade of the 21st century, we'll go through another moral convulsion.

And I'm like, well done, Professor Huntington.

And the good news is you come out of them.

That the society reacts and we have a culture change.

We don't go back.

And in this case, we should not go back to the pre-Trump era, but we go forward.

And the second reason, I just have tremendous faith in the power of the people manning our institutions in the military, in the election officials on the state level, Republicans on the state level.

So I think we'll hold.

Yeah.

Just quickly, the one difference there is we had a major issue that really did divide the nation.

And now we have Donald Trump, who's a force for chaos.

But I don't think we're as ideologically divided over some major issue as they were over slavery.

Say an intern released that video by accident or whatever, you take even their version.

A normal person said, America has oral history and racism.