About 'The Age of Fracture" by Daniel Rogers

A new book by a professor of history at Princeton goes over a thesis that change in the United States since the 1970’s has developed toward fracturing of the national sense of community and mutual obligations with a market based identity of individualism becoming the new national intellectual paradigm. I have just started reading this book published in 2011 so need write with reserve on the thesis. It does seem consistent with the idea of dumping 14 trillion dollars of public debt upon the taxpayers though. Obviously the congress would be reduced to squabbling about nickels and dimes after the president too rejected tax rate increases last December.

I should say that I am a little reticent about ascribing too much importance to intellectual histories of the era as being leading rather than responsive things. Political leaders of the 20th century were preponderantly reactionaries instead of creative leaders. Well, in centuries past being a good leader meant getting the golden horde motivate to conquer the rich land abroad, and today a more intellectual challenge in the U.S.A. to materially comprehend nationalism, equality, prosperity and ecology and economic environment is categorically flunked. U.S. Presidents since the Roosevelts-with the exceptions of Nixon and Eisenhower, have been blind donkeys wandering in the desert regarding environmental boundaries and their integral relationship to nationhood and citizenship.

Politicians and intellectuals in the U.S.A. may write or speak in advocacy of reformed economic national structure as well as in a post hoc descriptive amorphous intellectual fog. If the U.S. economic structure has morphed into a fractured Market Economy replacing structured democratic and national management, it may be reasonable to regard a modest anarchic abandonment of executive competence as the new norm for the office of presdident of the United States. That leads me to wonder if Ronald Regan's intentional 'narration role' of the U.S.A. during his tenure in which the nation became a field of dreams in which all individual fullfillment was possible even as we watched the epic unfold can be duplicated by today's Republican candidates that are challenged to start with the disadvantage of perhaps 18 trillion dollars of public debt by 2013.

Perhaps Donald Trump has the potential for the role of off screen narrator and on screen host of the American dream on a nationalist instead of a globalist scale. Careful economic gardening planting green infrastructure and economic balance at home would promote good relations and a return to competent national political structure domestically.