Is This Country Cracking Up?

The obvious answer is, No of course not. But there are signs and portents.

It’s a strange moment. There is a lot of social uproar in the country. With the possible exception of China, no major power in the world is more restive internally than the United States. Conflict, change, motion everywhere. Yet a heavy malaise hangs over the scene, a little but not really much like that of the early fifties. The most obvious cause for this malaise is the Vietnam War, but the roots of the trouble must go deeper. When you come to think of it, the war itself seems more symptom than cause. What characterizes American life, at least important parts of it, is a mounting loss of social confidence and solidarity. There is distrust, anger, frustration—and for good reasons. How widespread this mood may be, I do not know. You can say that the disturbance to which I am pointing is confined to a small segment of the intellectuals and the young; but a dismissal of this sort is too easy, sin...