Advice | Trump has ushered in the era of the “great misalignment.”

The biggest challenge, she wrote, “is what I have called ‘the great mismatch’ between the institutions we have and the institutions we need to address most of these problems.”

The framers of the Constitution, she wrote:

understood human weaknesses and passions. But they thought they had designed a set of institutions that could weather the storms. They also envisioned a nation in which civic virtue had been instilled in the people through families, schools, or faith-based congregations. These assumptions will be severely tested in the coming year.

The difficulty for institutions to prevail under such concerted pressure is becoming increasingly apparent.

Greg Contia political scientist at Princeton, in an essay published in December Compact magazine, “The rise of the sectarian university”, describes the erosion of national support for the mediating role of key institutions:

So the real danger to elite higher education is not that these places will be financially ruined, nor that hostile conservatives will effectively interfere with their internal operations. Instead, their position in American society will come to resemble that of The New York Times or that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is, they will remain rich and powerful, and there will still be many smart and competent people working within their reach. And yet their authority will become more fragile and their appeal more sectarian.

If universities continue to function as they have done so far, the same fate will befall them. From de facto national institutions, a valued part of our shared heritage, pursuing one of the essential purposes of a great modern society, they are increasingly seen as instruments of a cult. Public appreciation for higher education fell across the ideological spectrum, even before the events of this fall. Without a course correction, the silent majority of Americans are as likely to invest stock in an Ivy League professor’s research as they are to receive the next booster, even as Ivy League credentials receive great reverence within an increasingly inward-looking segment. of our privileged classes.

Steven Pinkera professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of “Enlightenment now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress,” is the most optimistic – or perhaps the least pessimistic – of those I contacted for this column. He replied to my question by email:

You can always think that you are in an unprecedented crisis when you list the worst things happening in the country at that moment. But this is a non-random sample, and selecting the worst developments in any given year will always make it seem like catastrophe is looming. It’s worth remembering the seemingly existential crises spanning decades that you and I have experienced, including:

• the 1960s, with the assassinations of three of the country’s most beloved figures, including the president; urban riots that killed dozens of people and set neighborhoods on fire in one night; an unpopular war that killed ten times as many Americans as in Iraq and Afghanistan; the fear of destruction in an all-out nuclear war; a generation that rejected prevailing social and sexual mores, many of whom called for violent communist or anarchist revolution; a segregationist third party candidate who won five states.

• the 1970s, with five terrorist attacks per day in many years; the resignation of both the vice president and the president; double-digit inflation and unemployment; two energy crises that were thought could end industrial civilization; “America Hostage” in Iran; a sitting president nearly ousted by his own party; etc.

• the 1980s, when violent crime and homelessness reached unprecedented levels; new fears of nuclear escalation; a crack cocaine crisis.

• the 2000s, with fears of weekly attacks on a 9/11 scale, or worse, attacks with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons; plans for surveillance of the entire US population; widespread ridicule and hatred of a president who led the country into two disastrous wars.

Pinker has repeatedly made his case on X (formerly Twitter) in recent days with the post “177 ways the world got better in 2023” on January 2 “From David Byrne’s reasons to be cheerful” on the same day and “No, 2023 wasn’t all bad, and here are 23 reasons why not” on January 4.

Pinker, however, is an outlier.

Larry Kramerwho just retired as president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and will soon become president of the London School of Economics, wrote in an email that several major contemporary trends are negative, including:

(1) Media fragmentation, linked to loss of standards, disappearance of local media and degradation of journalistic standards; (2) weakening of parties through well-intentioned but misleading regulations (e.g., campaign finance) that shifted control from professionals to private, wealthy ideologues; (3) policy regimes that have vastly exacerbated wealth inequality and made overwhelming numbers of Americans feel worse off, lowering life expectancy and preventing government from meeting people’s needs; (4) a shift between left and right toward identity politics that reduces people to their race, gender, and political ideology—sharpening the sense of difference by minimizing what we share, turning a shared political community of disagreement into warring camps of enemies.

Some of the people I contacted cited inequality and downward mobility as key factors undermining faith in democratic governance.

Allen Matusowa historian at Rice and the author of “The unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s,” wrote by email that he belongs “to the school that believes our democracy has not been in such danger since the Civil War, and the easy explanation is Trump. But the real question is why such a despicable demagogue has the support of so many?”

Matusow specifically mentioned “income inequality and” the cultural resentment of those left behind.

Trump’s contribution ‘to the left behind’, Matusow wrote:

It is a license to direct his resentment at minorities and to make expressions of prejudice acceptable. Since World War II we have had two other notable populist demagogues. Both took advantage of a moment to attack elites, though neither posed a threat to win the presidency. Joe McCarthy was careful not to stoke prejudice against racial and ethnic minorities, and for all his faults, George Wallace was not a serial liar. Trump sits in a classroom all alone.

Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, shares Matusow’s concerns about the harmful effects of inequality. Cain emailed me to say:

The recent growing dissatisfaction with democracy reminds us that people judge the fairness of their political system based on how they fare within it. Downward mobility and the loss of political and social status lead to alienation from democratic norms and distrust in government. We believe that democracy is a better form of government because it will lead to better policies by being accountable to the people. But if it does not perform well, democratic legitimacy will erode across the political spectrum.

These factors, Cain continued, work together

social and political instability due to globalization, automation and social media. Much has changed in recent decades, including the country’s more diverse racial and ethnic makeup, employment opportunities more strongly defined along educational lines, and expanded gender roles. MAGA rage and fear of replacement arise from the simultaneous loss of social status, economic opportunity, and political power as a result of these major economic, social, and demographic trends.

The disagreement between Democrats and Republicans, Cain argued, fuels a vicious circle:

The progressive left wants change to happen faster, which only fuels right-wing fears and enthusiasm. The cycle of political tensions continues to build. Trump stirs the pot, but tensions have been rising for decades.

In the short term, Cain is not optimistic:

We cannot have effective government until we have sufficient consensus, and we cannot have consensus unless the people in government strive for effective policies rather than fame and a media career. Unless one party is in charge and wins the trifecta of control, we will wallow in a polarized, divided government for another term or two. That’s the design of the Madisonian system: stay in neutral until we know where we want to go.

Perhaps the most pointed comment I received was from Theda Skocpola professor of government and sociology at Harvard who responded to my question at the height of the controversy over former Harvard President Claudine Gay:

For a while, I thought America was suffering multiple elite-induced institutional collapses across the board, opening the door to a national and global maelstrom. But now I find myself so overwhelmingly upset by all of this, including the collapse of core values ​​at my own university, that I can’t write about it coherently.