Twenty eighteen has been full of backward glances. The most frequent subject has been that singular year 1968, fulcrum and focal point of everything we sum up in that dread phrase “the ’60s.”
A less depressing prospect is on view if we travel back not 50 but 30 years, to May 31, 1988, when Ronald Reagan, in the last year of his presidency, delivered one of his most magnificent speeches. At the end of his first inaugural address, Lincoln famously spoke of the “mystic chords of memory” that, beckoning toward truths that transcend...