The idea that progress has some kind of unstoppable momentum was always a very American belief. But it’s really an article of faith more than a historical law—the Christian fantasy about history’s happy ending was reconfigured during the Enlightenment into a set of secular fantasies about inevitable improvement. One version was our blithe conviction that America’s forms of freedom and democracy and justice and affluence must prevail in the end. I can imagine, for the first time in my life, that America has permanently tipped into disarray and decline.
