Peggy Noonan gets it right with the general sentiment of her latest column:

My fear is that the issues mount, increase and are experienced as a daily harassment by more and more people who, public education being the spotty thing it’s been, are less held together than in the past by a unified patriotic theory of America, and consequently less keen on—and protective of—our political traditions. And things begin to fray very badly, even, down the road, to breaking points.

I think she misidentifies the cause, though, or at least stops too short, with the effect amounting to the same thing:

… I had always assumed that America was uniquely able to tolerate division. Shared patriotic feeling and respect for our political traditions left us, as a nation, with a lot of give. We could tug this way or that, correct and overcorrect, and do fine.

My concern the past few decades has been that we’ve lost or are losing some of that give, that divisions are sharper and deeper now in part because many of the issues that separate us are so piercing and personal. Vietnam and Watergate were outer issues. Many questions now speak of our essence as human beings.

The implication is that the slot machine of socio-politics has spun and given us a challenging collection of issues.  To the contrary, the underlying problem is one that virtually ensures that such issues will come to the fore:  Government’s growth and centralization is what’s made “our essence as human beings” a matter that must be settled at the federal level.

Our “tug” as a nation was allowed by the fact that knotty questions weren’t considered the purview of government, and to the extent that they were, we pushed them down locally.  Over the past century-plus, progressives and other statists have been erasing that critical feature of our civic system.

One thing on which I think Noonan’s absolutely correct is this, which might be the defining hubris of our era:

… people grow up in a certain environment and tend to think that environment, and its assumptions, are continuing and will always continue.

This applies not just to the ability of America’s “financial strength” to “absorb any blow,” but to culture, too.  People assume the principles supporting and reinforced by marriage will simply remain in place if we change the nature of the institution.  People assume entrepreneurs will simply continue to work and produce no matter how much disincentive we layer on top of them, as if the fancy name indicates a genetic driver.

In a nutshell, our social system used to leave space for people to accommodate their own beliefs about life and reality.  In the name of equality, we’ve moved to implement one worldview as truth, and calling it “objective,” we treat it as natural to impose it on everybody else.