When does community end? If the country feels as if it is fraying, that a big scramble is on during which everyone grabs for their own, it is because the sense of unity that fragilely sews together a nation that depends on comity started coming undone first. It is not the economy, stupid. The furies of our times are about something else.
The sad and disturbing fact is that many Americans are having trouble handling the new demography that has come down on them pretty fast. The components of change embedded in the population decades ago by individuals choosing not to have more than two children put the country on a fast track that along with immigration altered the country’s demography. Now the consequences of those decisions are being reflected in an election that people want to treat as a discussion about the direction of the economy and about its closely-related cousin, Medicare. But the election is about so much more. It is about whether the nation at some point understands the dangerous point at which we have arrived, when community is not about everyone. The Republican line about saving America is rhetorical gauze for something more disturbing.