We Thought We Were Free

The America we live in, our nation, our people, our society, is not the America most of us were born in at all. The uniquely American forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the football games, the local bars, the movies, the concerts, and the holidays. But the spirit, which most of us never noticed because we made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, has been fundamentally transformed. The transformation has occurred through the slowly creeping separation of not only the government from the people, but the people themselves from their country. It has taken place so gradually and so insensibly that the majority of Americans, preoccupied with the latest crisis happening in their own lives, have failed to see the slow motion underneath of the whole process of our government and the spirit of our country growing remoter and remoter.

For the most part this shift has…