Wilfred McClay writes at Law and Liberty about threats to the American story.

Even before the shamefulness of the Afghanistan debacle, still unfolding as I write, there has been a growing and justifiable disgust with the self-serving incompetence of our leadership classes, and a sense of resignation to a future of ever-growing polarization and irreversible diminution of our national self-understanding. Hard times give rise to troubled thoughts; and when the hardness of the times is in large part a product of our own folly and improvidence, the thoughts are likely to turn inward, like knives in the brain.

Hyperbole aside, though, this is far from being the worst such moment in our history. It is important to get a grip and remember that. We have experienced times like this before, even as recently as the 1970s. We can come back from this orgy of mutual recrimination, but only if we wish to do so. But this time around feels exceptionally perilous, if only because we are living through it rather than remembering it. And of course, that is not the only reason. In the Sixties and Seventies, the most radical and destructive influences in the culture were on the outside of the establishment, looking in. Now they are on the inside looking out, enthroned in university presidents’ offices and corporate executive suites and other centers of political and cultural influence, and able to use the awesome leverage of the law to do far more than just look. …

… To speak of the loss of America’s story, then, is a fanciful but powerful way to get at this. The change is not a result of accumulation and dispassionate weighing of evidence. It proceeds from something almost a priori, the abandonment of a fundamental vision of the nation’s aspirational character, of its mythos, of the wind that has lifted our wings for two and a half centuries, and replaced it with….what?