This is the source of its present troubles. There has long been a controversy in this country about what a real America is or would be. Is it its history of change and reform, or is it the past that was lost in all that progress? There is something else in play now that has disrupted the old, frayed likemindedness, our former willingness, however grudging, to grant the other side a point or two. Now we have a president with no sense of shared history or purpose, who speaks of carnage in the streets and calls his opposition “left lunatics” and “very sick people” who hate our country and want to destroy it. Obviously this view of things is not compatible with the orderly transfer of power or any other civil virtue of democracy, or, frankly, of normal adulthood.