But is America beyond the political realm also in crisis? A recent essay by Damon Linker in The Times profiled conservative intellectuals whose writing, he argued, helps explain where the MAGA right is coming from. What struck me, reading some of their work, is the dire portrait they paint of the state of our nation. For example, Patrick Deneen’s “Regime Change” describes America thus: “Once-beautiful cities and towns around the nation have succumbed to an ugly blight. Do they have any sense, from personal memory or reading, of what America was like 30 or 50 years ago?

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Persons: Damon, MAGA, Patrick Deneen’s Organizations: Times Locations: America