The Great American Earthquake

Column: Can the foundations of our society hold?

"Who can deny that, in the United States today, as never before in its history, there is a vast unease about the prospects of the republic?"

So asked Irving Kristol in "Our Shaken Foundations," a 1968 essay for Fortunemagazine. Observing the student revolt, urban riots, increase in crime, and mass mobilizations against the war in Vietnam, Kristol acknowledged that Americans in the late 1960s were not the first people in history to worry about the instability of their society. Nor would they be the last. "The premonition of apocalypse springs eternal in the human breast." Every civilization undergoes recurrent cycles of anxiety and dislocation that eventually subside. "Somehow, the human race endures, life continues to yield its modest satisfactions; the world doesn't actually come to an end."

Yet, Kristol added, Americans do not live in "the world." They live in "a particular world; and history records many particular worlds that did indeed come to their ends—sometimes abruptly, more often slowly and insensibly, but always painfully for those who felt themselves part of what was being destroyed." The revolutions of 1968, he went on, may have been the beginning of another such painful transition.

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