The following guest post is by Drew Maciag, author of Edmund Burke in America. I appreciate Andrew Hartman’s offer to post shortened versions of our recent S-USIH conference papers, and mine will have to be a slice of an abridgement.  My original paper was written as an exploratory draft of a proposed book section.  It offered some possible explanations for why the traumas Americans experienced between 1974 and 1980 resulted in debilitating malaise rather than in creative response.  My working hypothesis was that by the 1970s sufficient numbers of Americans had lost confidence in the intellectual pillars of modernity (science, Read more