“ The young in the elite universities-the youth of an imperial power- feel the more disenchanted the more serious they are, as if they had been born at the wrong place and wrong time, as if everything interesting in the world were happening somewhere else. The size of the country, and the decentralization of power and influence within it, play a part in their frustration: almost any measure of influence an individual can hope to gain seems dwarfed by the sheer bigness and variety of the United States. So does the absence from national life of anything other than a politics of inconclusive bargaining among organized interests about minor fix-its. In this American circumstance the triumphalism of the doctrine of the one true way rings hollow. National triumph goes hand in hand with individual impotence.
— Roberto Manganeira Unger & Cornel West, The Future Of American Progressivism
