U.S. political pendulum is swinging wider

Mark me down as another American experiencing free-floating anxiety about the future of the country.
 
If you feel it, too, you know it can be overwhelming, a dreadful stew of fear and monkey mind in which you can’t quite keep your finger on the root of the angst.
 
The condition isn’t yet included in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM5), but its effects can be mimicked in the laboratory: Immobilize a subject for 48 hours and force him to binge nonstop on MSNBC, Fox, Slate and The Drudge Report, all at the same time -- while whispering into his ear, “The end is coming.”
 
The merciful clinician will make Xanax available after an hour.
 
There are a thousand explanations for unease in the country, most of them economic. But I’m beginning to think it’s the one-two punch of the political left and right (or from whatever direction Donald Trump is firing) that is pushing us all to the edge. Or at least this American.
 
On the hard left, the narrative is utterly cynical:  America is and always has been a racist, corporate oligarchy riddled with injustices. And on the Trump right, which is all too reminiscent of the 1960’s John Birch Society, the narrative is dire and alarmist: Man your battle stations; Mongrel tribes at the wire!
 
I recently ran across an insightful passage in Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution by the historian Jonathan Israel that offers insight into what I think ambitious American progressives are up to.
 
“The Revolution,” Israel writes, “denied the validity of ideas, customs, institutions, or laws inherited from the past absolutely and totally. This undeviating repudiation and discrediting of all previously accepted values, morals, codes, laws, and practices transpired with astounding speed.”  
 
In other words, as a prerequisite to radical change, the precepts of the established order must be debunked and demolished.
 
It’s hard not to see that occurring today, especially on college campuses.  There, under the tutelage of progressive academics, the very concept of the First Amendment is being disabused and the notions of the American Dream and American exceptionalism are viewed as dubious at best. Founding Fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, are scurrilously re-examined through a 21st Century lens, and figures like Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson have been thrown under the wheels of the history bus.
 
It’s not just at colleges though. Americans who believe in traditional marriage, the unimpeded right to bear arms, or whom question the most alarmist global warming predictions, are routinely attacked as guilty of “hate speech” by the enlightened.
 
The Trump phenomenon is easily seen as the pent up reaction to this dynamic, an intoxicating catharsis of expression growing darker by the day.  A movement that at first delighted in impolitic speech is morphing before our eyes into a radicalism as un-American as anything the left has brewing.
 
Trump’s proposal to ban immigrants based on religion was bracing enough, but even more worrisome are his apologists in the news media who argue that Trump’s doing the nation a service by pushing out the narrowed edges of the speech envelope.  What he’s really doing is scapegoating entire peoples for America’s economic and security concerns.
 
We’ve seen that strain of thinking take hold before.  It never ends well.
 
Between the progressive left and Trump right, the arc of the American political pendulum is dangerously widening. The unacceptable is becoming acceptable, and our core cultural standards are being put at risk from both sides of the aisle.
 
I have never felt as moderate as I do today.
 
William F. B. O’Reilly is a Republican consultant.