By embracing the politics of inevitability, we raised a generation without history. How will these young Americans react now that the promise of inevitability has been so obviously broken? Perhaps they will slide from inevitability toward eternity. It must be hoped that they could, instead, become a historical generation, rejecting the traps of inevitability and eternity that older generations have laid before them. One thing is certain: If young people do not begin to make history, politicians of eternity and inevitability will destroy it. And to make history, young Americans will have to know some. This is not the end, but a beginning.
“The time is out of joint. O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!” Thus Hamlet. Yet he concludes: “Nay, come, let’s go together.”
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First published by The Bodley Head in 2017
(First published in the United States by Tim Duggan Books,
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On Tyranny Page 6
