The ugly currents that divide and poison democracies may take advantage of existing fissures and divisions in society, but they are not caused by them. They are manufactured, they are infections imposed on open wounds that, if left alone, would eventually heal on their own.

We don’t have a “divided society”, or “partisan conflict”. What we have is class warfare instigated and aggravated to bring about a specific economic and political result. The social and cultural divisions that plague the United States (and most other democracies in the West)are a reaction to progressive economic and political forces which have been operating for well over a century. This is inevitable in democracies, even imperfect ones: left alone, things WILL get better. Those with power do not want to give it up, and they are learning how to enlist (with the same marketing techniques they developed for commercial purposes) the very populations they exploit to assist them because they can no longer mobilize on their own the sheer power necessary to maintain their hegemony.

And the source of this contagion, at least in America, is on the political Right. This is not an American problem, its a Conservative one. Once you’ve lived long enough to acquire sufficient temporal perspective, the pattern is very clear. I came of age, I developed political awareness, during my adolescence in the mid-1960s. I have seen a big enough piece of the history that began with the end of the Gilded Age to see that the events since the Civil Rights era and today form a seamless narrative, which is in turn a part of that larger whole.

We are not “entering new and troubled times”. What we are experiencing is the Empire striking back.