Commentary: Will 2022 turn the clock back to America before 1964?
“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.
