“The United States is now at one of those historic forks in the road whose outcome will prove as fateful as those of the 1860s, the 1930s, and the 1960s,” Nancy MacLean wrote in her 2017 book, “Democracy in Chains.”
History is punctuated by discontinuities that alter its trajectory. The key to the occurrence of such watershed moments is less the leaders than a sociopolitical environment that is receptive to change. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson obviously played major roles at the turning points MacLean listed, but the spirits of those times were more fundamental.
The current inflection point has become much more apparent over the past five years — and especially in the last few weeks. The United States in 2022 is at a crossroads and the direction taken will likely determine whether the experiment in democracy launched in 1776 will survive. One of the forks before us leads to autocracy, kleptocracy, plutocracy, renewed subordination of women and people of color, and to a time before the dramatic progress that began in 1964. The other points toward a reignition of the spirit that temporarily prevailed in the mid-1960s.
