I believe it was marketing guru Seth Godin who introduced me to the idea that history may not repeat, but it definitely rhymes.  That’s the sense you get when reading Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic.  Sometimes patterns and trends really do exist, really do play out in history.  Case in point: the idea of times of cultural crisis resulting in something different (though perhaps not “new”).  From Levin on what happened in the 1970s after the shifts in the 50s and 60s towards individualism:

Americans thus sought a cure for the malaise and pandemonium of the 1970s not through the revival of an old consolidating tendency, but through the maturation of the new spirit of individualism and liberation.  There was no fighting the core fact of postwar America—the fact of an intensifying deconsolidation—but there could be better ways to live it.  The spirit of individualism, the nation could readily see, had gone too far and grown too wild.  America’s old norms no longer held sway.  But people cannot long abide an absence of norms, and so in the course of the later 1970s and into the 1980s, American society went through what political scientist Francis Fukuyama, in his 1999 book The Great Disruption, called a “renorming.”  This meant not the recovery of old cultural rules and taboos, but the development of new ones.  These new norms were rooted in the new ethic of individualism but geared to giving people’s lives some stability and structure.

And because everything is connected, there are obvious economic consequences to such shifting and renorming (into what Levin asserts is a more diffuse society).

Over and over, the effects of America’s diffusion, and then of its efforts to adjust to that diffusion, seemed to reach the wealthy and advantaged as rewards, but hit the poor and disadvantaged as punishments.  If the new American ethic pushes every individual to become more like himself or herself, rather than more like everyone else, it will, even at its best, tend to accentuate differences, to increases distances, and to turn a range of distinctions into a set of bifurcations.

What’s true of the 70s is also true of this decade in the 21st century.

I think it was an episode of Sherlock, though I cannot say with certainty, where I learned one question that could lead to a world of learning: the question of “who benefits.”  For all the good that certain changes are doing for certain groups of people, those changes are doing something even better for others.

You can get a copy of Levin’s The Fractured Republic here or at any reputable bookstore.