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David Brooks

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

I had hoped this election would be a moment of national renewal. I had hoped that the Democrats could decisively defeat MAGA populism and send us down a new national path.

That’s clearly not going to happen. No matter who wins this election, it will be close, and this is still going to be an evenly and bitterly divided nation.

In retrospect, I think I was expecting too much of politics. When certain sociological and cultural realities are locked in, there is not much politicians can do to redirect events. The two parties and their associated political committees have spent billions this year, and nothing has altered the race. The polls are just where they were at the start. If you had fallen asleep a year ago and woke up today, you would have missed little of consequence, except that it’s Kamala Harris leading the blue 50 percent of the country now and not Joe Biden.

It’s clearer to me now that most of the time politicians are not master navigators leading us toward a new future. They are more like surfers who ride the waves created by people further down in the core society.

Let’s look at America between 1880 and 1910. In the early years of that period, American society had been thrown into turmoil by industrialization and uncontrolled capitalism, which produced awesome economic growth and untold human misery. Waves of immigration swept across the country, transforming urban America. Political corruption was rampant in cities and political incompetence was the norm in Washington, D.C.

America faced a core civilizational challenge: How do we harness the energy of industrialization to build a humane society?

American renewal began in the hearts of the people at all layers of society. People were desperate for change. “All history is the history of longing,” Jackson Lears writes in his book about this era, “Rebirth of a Nation.” He argued that during these decades a “widespread yearning........

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