This essay by Ezra Klein in today's Times is thoughtful and quite good. But I am afraid that Klein's optimism for our country is a little rosy-eyed . As someone points out in the piece, by any reasonable definition, the US is really a quite young democracy. A sizeable portion of its people didn't have full legal citizenship rights until at least the 1960s. This same scholar notes that young democracies are more fragile and susceptible than older democracies of which we try to claim membership. Recent years seem to bear that out to one extent or another.
On my first birthday, Jackie Robinson had been in the (white) big leagues for almost exactly one year. 70+ years later, after all those years of supposed racial "progress", I wish I could share Klein's optimism. But quite the contrary, I have never been more pessimistic about the present and future of this country.
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