The icon for the new regime should be the graph showing the stock market plunging off the charts into the abyss. I think the image of collapse reflects many things:
• The strength of our armed forces, particularly their ability to fend off cyber-attacks.
• The confidence of our allies in our capacity to stand with them.
• The ability of our universities and agencies to conduct research.
• Our net worth, the collective wealth of Americans. We Americans, as a group, are down trillions.
Performance in all these areas is making America poor, rather than great.
America has been poor before. I grew up among people who lived through The Depression and joked bitterly about squirrel for lunch, possum for supper. That grinding poverty sapped their confidence. They isolated themselves in the 1930s and let dictators take over most of Europe without raising a hand.
A lot of what people like me have been complaining about — the daily erosion of checks against autocracy — is hard to measure. But it is not hard — not hard at all — to measure the damage to the economy.
This is the road to hardship. We have been down it before.
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