This is an era when the great certainties that ruled American life for nearly three generations are being questioned more deeply, more widely and more seriously than at any time in decades.
When the Communist Soviet Union in 1939 agreed to a pact with Nazi Germany, an English diplomat remarked that "all the isms have become wasms." So it may be in the United States, where the Donald Trump movement has raised many of the difficult, searing questions that, until recently, remained just below the surface of American life — though many of them seemed so settled that to raise them was imprudent and impertinent. No longer.
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