“We are at the end of an age: but how few people know this! The sense of this has begun to appear in the hearts of many; but it has not yet swum up to the surface of their consciousness.

“This will happen, even though there exist many obstacles to it — among them, enormous but corroding institutions. As these lines are being written, something is happening in the United States that has had no precedent. A great division among the American people has begun — gradually, slowly — to take shape: not between Republicans and Democrats, and not between ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals,’ but between people who are still unthinking believers in technology and in economic determinism and people who are not. The non-believers may or may not be conscious or convinced traditionalists: but they are men and women who have begun not only to question but, here and there, to oppose publicly the increasing pouring of cement over the land, the increasing inflation of automobile traffic of every kind, the increasing acceptance of noisome machinery ruling their lives. Compared with this division the present ‘debates’ about taxes and rates and political campaigns are nothing but ephemeral froth blowing here and there on little waves, atop the great oceanic tides of history. That the present proponents of unending technological ‘progress’ call themselves ‘conservatives’ is but another example of the degeneration of political and social language.”

— from John Lukacs, At the End of an Age (Yale University Press, 2002)

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