Coal heavers wear sandwich boards to protest against low wages in 1921. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
No word is invoked more to characterize the current era than “crisis.” The term has been wielded incessantly in 2020—already the most tumultuous year since 1968 and still only half over—to designate a series of new and ongoing plights. It has named the “impeachment crisis” and the “constitutional crisis” many thought it revealed, themselves signs of the “crisis of polarization” in U.S. politics. Crisis nearly always describes the coronavirus pandemic and the economic turmoil it has unleashed. Journalists speak of a “crisis of police violence” against Black people in the United States, a slow-burn tragedy that sparked a “crisis of civil unrest” after the killing of George Floyd. And Americans move nervously toward a presidential election whose results, regardless of the outcome, will be thrown into doubt by accusations of foreign meddling or partisan hijacking. A “crisis of legitimacy,” perhaps even a “crisis of emergency powers,” looms on the horizon.
