Sometime in 2020 or 2021, Americans seem to have crossed a psychic barrier and plunged into new territory, a place where things aren’t quite as forbidden as they used to be. Citizens fell into dubious battle with one another, to use Milton’s phrase. People taught themselves to think outside the box. Crowds learned that they could, for example, burn down a police precinct and the police would flee. You could try to set fire to a federal courthouse; you could try to torch the Church of the Presidents in Lafayette Square, across from the White House. You could loot stores and walk away with stuff and the law wouldn’t follow…

There’s a queasy sense of crisis. Are things all that bad? What does it add up to? Is the country merely traveling over a bad stretch of road? It has happened before, in the second half of the 1960s, for example. Is it too much to say that this moment feels like the 1850s? It was in 1856 that Rep. Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery South Carolina Democrat, caned the abolitionist Republican Sen. Charles Sumner almost to death on the floor of the Senate. It took Sumner three years to recover.

In its violent certainty, in its blind self-righteousness, the deed has a savor of 2022 about it. Eighteen fifty-six was a presidential election year in which three mediocre candidates contended: Democrat James Buchanan, Republican John C. Frémont and Know Nothing former President Millard Fillmore. Buchanan won. He turned out to be one of the worst American presidents, in the dismal company of Andrew Johnson and Warren Harding. As it happened, that worst president, Buchanan, preceded the best president, Abraham Lincoln—to whom he bequeathed a divided country and a civil war.