I think almost all of us, progressive and otherwise, are conscious that we live in a strange and special era. “The best of times and the worst of times” … yada yada; not “evil” like the 1930s, but strange, dysfunctional, unstable, unpredictable and of a sinister syncopation.

How could we define it?

I would define this time we live in as “the end of the post-Cold-War,” the end of one thing, without the new thing being yet apparent.

To understand this concept it helps to be rather old. I was 45 when the Berlin Wall went down in 1989 and the…