I think that we’re at an alarming moment in American political development and maybe in world political development, because the United States is so influential. If the trends of the last thirty or forty years are not halted and reversed—and those trends include increasingly inequality, a crumbling public life, a disintegrating public infrastructure, an exhausted ecology, and a huge war arsenal, and more and more war making—then I’m rather gloomy about the prospects for the American future and the harm that the United States could do to the world. But I think it might be reversed. There are no guarantees. It might be reversed. But if it’s reversed, I think it will be because of the rise of oppositional movements from the masses of people in the middle and at the bottom, who have been made to pay the cost in their economic well-being and in their community life, and really in their culture and mental life, too. Think for example of the degradation of democratic discourse in the United States as a result of floods of propaganda. If this can be reversed, I think it will be because of the rise of new protest movements.