First, inflation has returned at last. Since early in the Obama era Republicans have consistently warned that Democratic spending (or the Federal Reserve’s expansion of the money supply) would bring back 1970s-style inflation rates, and time and again those predictions turned out wrong. But the combination of the Biden administration’s oversize burst of stimulus and not-quite-post-Covid supply-chain issues have finally generated real inflationary conditions — not the conspiratorial Shadowstats version but the real thing, the kind that palpably affects prices and paychecks and politics itself.

Second, crime is a major political issue once again. After a horrendous spike in the murder rate last year, the data for 2021 so far shows a much lower increase — but that’s still an increase on top of 2020’s surge, so the overall homicide rate continues to climb. Meanwhile, it’s easy to notice indicators of collapsing public authority that evoke the “no radio” signs that used to adorn New York City cars — from The San Francisco Chronicle tweeting recently that the city’s residents were debating whether to “tolerate burglaries as a part of city living, and focus on barricading homes” to a brazen incident of alleged large-scale shoplifting in Oxford, Conn., not that far from my own home, that became a viral video.

Third, for the first time since the Reagan era, the United States has a true great power rival in China and a zone of Cold War-style brinkmanship around Taiwan.