How do we get out of this mess in the United States?
Well, of course, that largely depends on what you mean by “mess.” And if not already entirely clear by our cacophonous, conflicted national discourse, we’re hardly in agreement on what that is.
To over-focus on diagnoses highlighted by the Republican v. Democrat prizefight is to miss something important, I believe. And while I tried recently to sketch the outlines of that broader contrast in narratives of danger, I really only succeeded in scratching the surface of the divergence in interpretive frameworks making sense of U.S. decline. In what follows, I take that analysis of “problem definition” one step deeper, before pivoting to the equally important question of “solution definitions” and the interesting ways they also profoundly diverge.
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