I am a child of the presidency. I came of age politically in the early 1970s when the end game in the Vietnam War still stoked furious debate and the constitutional crisis of Watergate brought down the Nixon presidency. Historians, presidential scholars and politicians fell over themselves to decry the excesses of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr famously termed “the imperial presidency.” And young minds like mine were entranced with sorting it all out. I have since struggled to convey to students the seismic feeling that the tectonic plates of politics in the US were shifting under our feet.
Today conjures similar tremors. An obstructionist Senate leadership awaits delivery of articles of impeachment against a criminally unhinged chief executive who blithely walks us to the brink of war with Iran, the planet faces the existential crisis of a sixth extinction with the relentless march of climate change, and—OMG!—democratic socialist Bernie Sanders has a serious shot at being elected President. WTF!