Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 Yeats ,1919

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*

Letter to the Editor

"The American Dream of the middle class has all but disappeared ,substituted with people struggling just to buy next week's groceries...............What is it going to take to open the eyes of our elected officials? AMERICA IS IN SERIOUS DECLINE.

Timothy McVeigh

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But then Sanders got up and said it.

"This election is about ending the forty- year decline of our middle class, the reality that forty-seven million men,women ,and children live in poverty.

"A future to believe in."

Sanders and only Sanders ,talked that way about decline and suffering.

 *Jill Lepore, The New Yorker August 8&15  2016

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Not all apocalyptic forecasts are bombast. McVegh's letter to an upstate New York paper was written four years after the end of President Reagan's Morning in America .And  Mr. Gorbachev having  had torn down "that Wall".

And also at what many of us thought  an optimistic moment as new young candidate Bill Clinton seemed headed to replace the fading WWII hero , President George Bush. But the future Oklahoma City  bomber expressed the same concerns as Bernie Sanders 24 years later.

Neither McVegh nor Sanders were creating an otherwise non-existent problem. Statistics seem to show that the major distinction between them was that the middle class  deterioration was only ten years old in 1992 (its onset interestingly coinciding  with Reagan's cutting the top incremental tax rate from 70% to 28% which was supposedly going to result in what Keynes called "animal spirits" which would magically produce good times for all ) and another 24 years passed before  Bernie's sobering warning in Philadelphia.

Perhaps a  psychologically oriented poll could  produce  credible data telling us  whether a substantial share of the middle class is ready for a far more drastic rejection of the status quo than just voting for Trump. My gut feeling is that that is only true of the sub- middle classes. But the next   President  and all of us need to guided by  something infinitely more useful than Flavius' gut.

(a couple of revisions to clarify the distinction between the New Yorker quotes and my maunderings)