Trying to Make Sense of This Moment

Lately I’ve found myself sitting with a question I never expected to ask about my own country. Not just what’s happening politically, but what seems to be shifting culturally, morally, almost atmospherically?

Conversations that once revolved around policy now circle something deeper…character, conscience, the limits of power.

If you’re anything like me, you may be struggling to understand how behavior that would once have ended political careers now barely registers as a surprise. And how somewhere along the way, our national capacity for shock seems to have worn out.

In an earlier column, I wrote about this unsettling shift… the way behavior that once would have been considered unthinkable has slowly begun to feel routine. That piece, “When the Unthinkable Becomes Routine,” explored how quickly the outrageous can normalize in our public life.

That observation stayed with me, and it led me down a deeper rabbit hole.

While it’s tempting to explain the turbulence through personalities or parties, what if what we’re really experiencing isn’t simply political chaos, but the uneasy middle of a societal reset?

This question piqued my curiosity, so I took a deeper research dive and discovered The Fourth Turning, a book by historians William Strauss and Neil Howe who argue that societies tend to move through long generational cycles. Periods of institutional strength and confidence give way to cultural questioning, then to an unraveling of trust, and eventually to a crisis that forces renewal.

It’s not a tidy or universally accepted theory. Historians rarely agree on neat patterns in human behavior. But it does offer a lens through which to view moments when a society begins to feel… untethered.

Geopolitical analyst George Friedman makes a similar observation in his book The Storm Before the Calm. Friedman suggests that American institutions tend to experience roughly 80-year cycles of strain and reinvention…moments when the structures that once felt stable begin to show their age.

If that framework holds any truth, the turbulence we’re living through may not be as unprecedented as it feels.

Resets rarely arrive gracefully. They are noisy. Disorienting. Often deeply uncomfortable. Old assumptions lose their authority before new ones have fully formed. And in that vacuum, almost anything can feel possible…including behavior that once would have been disqualifying.

Institutions are challenged, and it’s times like these when leaders who disrupt norms often rise to prominence precisely because the existing system no longer commands universal trust.

Hard as it is, when I remove my emotions about the chaotic shitstorm we’re experiencing and look through a somewhat dispassionate lens, the intensity of today’s political climate may be less about one individual and more about a culture struggling to redefine itself.

That doesn’t make the moment easier to live through. Resets rarely feel hopeful from the inside. They often feel chaotic, even frightening, particularly for those who value stability, conscience, and institutional integrity.

But history suggests something else as well. Periods of disruption are also the moments when societies begin to clarify what they stand for.

The civil rights movement, the reforms that followed Watergate, the rebuilding that occurred after the Great Depression…each emerged from periods when many people believed the country had lost its moral footing.

Looking back, those moments weren’t simply times of decline. They were turning points. Which brings us back to the question. What if what we’re witnessing right now isn’t simply political chaos, but the uneasy middle of a societal reset?

If so, the most important question may not be which personalities dominate the headlines today, but what kind of culture we choose to build on the other side.

Because resets, by their nature, aren’t just political. They’re cultural and ultimately moral.

Which means the real work of a reset doesn’t happen only in elections or institutions. It happens in the values a society decides it’s no longer willing to compromise.