There was a moment in American life, two centuries ago, that came to be known as the Era of Good Feelings. Whatever name is given to our own era, it won’t be that. Stability, optimism, unity, pride, satisfaction, civility—yes, these qualities in a society can be overrated, and conceal deep flaws. Think of Edwardian Britain. Or America in the 1950s. But a broad retreat from those qualities, as we are seeing now, is no sign of health.

This first section of The American Crisis looks primarily not at national politics, the state of democracy, or the person in the Oval Office—nor primarily at the events of the past four years—but rather at underlying conditions of society as a whole that have been deteriorating for decades. The coronavirus pandemic may confirm that Americans still care for one another and still possess an ability to self-organize locally in the absence of leadership and honesty at the top. But income inequality continues to widen, as it has been doing since the ’70s. Social mobility in America has not dropped to the levels of feudal Europe, but the best predictor of where you will end up in life is where you started out in life. Saying that there are gaps in the health-care system is like looking at a map and saying that there are gaps between the continents. The chipping away at the Affordable Care Act by politicians and judges—with no alternative in sight—has only made matters worse. Disparities along lines of race are entrenched, even as people in public life use race and ethnicity—maybe in coded language, maybe not—to rile up their followers. On the internet it’s worse: White nationalists find one another in dark corners; conspiracy theories such as QAnon flourish everywhere, offering a “post-truth” alternative to reality-based perception. There is no post-truth version of a hurricane or wildfire, but denial of climate change remains more robust than our ability to prevent or pay for the consequences. This general unraveling was the context for a public-health crisis more serious than any humanity has faced in a century.