There’s a great risk that our political future will be like the film “Groundhog Day” as if it were centered around 2016. But the country is also going through some fundamental transformations, and so is Western civilization itself. Orestes Brownson once saw our country’s destiny as “continuing and completing” Rome, reiterating the idea that Rome never falls, it’s only ever born anew.

Whether we can go that far with Brownson or not, we can at least acknowledge that the United States is partly built on a memory of an older western dynamic.