By David K. Shipler
Beginning
at noon Friday, when Donald Trump becomes the most childish, reckless, and truthless
president in modern American history, the United States takes the first step
into a new category of nations: those once mighty and noble that are falling
into frailty and disrepute. Unless our institutions and traditions turn out to
be stronger than our people—which is entirely possible—we will become the
charter member of what can be called the Fourth World.
It is a
place of undoing. It is a place where moral values of the common good are
picked apart, strand by strand, until only the shreds of caring and justice
remain. It is where progress is dismantled: progress—albeit fitful and
incomplete—in mobilizing the society through government to protect the
impoverished from utter ruin, the innocent from false imprisonment, minorities
from tyranny, children from hunger, families from dangerous foods and medicines
and polluted air and water, and the earth from the end-stage of catastrophic
global warming.
There is
nothing divinely ordained about America’s greatness. Once Trump and the
radicals who will populate most of his cabinet finish their efforts to destroy
what has been painstakingly constructed over decades, it will take a generation
to recover. That is the actual time when it will be appropriate to plead, “Make
America Great Again!”
The Fourth
World will come after the Third World, a term coined in 1952 by Alfred Sauvy, a
French demographer, to mean poor, undeveloped countries “ignored, exploited,
scorned, like the Third Estate,” he wrote in L’Observateur. His reference to the Third Estate dated back to the
gathering storm of the French Revolution, when Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes used it
to refer to the common people, as opposed to the clergy (First Estate) and the
nobility (Second Estate).
