It’s a bit of a trope in this year of our Lord 2025 to say that we, whoever we are, are living in unprecedented times. Cultural, political, and social change ran amok between 2010 and 2025. The rise of Black Lives Matter, the transgender movement, Trumpism, COVID-19, and more have made the world very different from that of millennials, Generation X, or baby boomers.

The problem with the claim that we are living in “unprecedented” times is that each of those respective generations I just mentioned defined their own precedents. It’s better just to say things are different. I know different doesn’t sound quite as spicy, or as urgent, as unprecedented does, but it does have the virtue of being truer. And it has the truth of being a real part of a real history of a real people, rather than fever dreams of utopians always pining for a better world that is just beyond the horizon, if the old order could only be finally gotten rid of.

Every single generation is convinced, it seems, that their revolution will work, and their moment is uniquely in need of revolution. This was the belief that drove the Southern states to secede from the Union in 1860 and 1861. In the summer of 1860, my great-great-grandfather, Robert Morisey, was born in eastern North Carolina on a sizable plantation. Infant Rob lived among people who believed that Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party represented an unprecedented threat to the slaveholding order. When Abraham Lincoln called up soldiers to prosecute the Civil War, baby Rob’s part of North Carolina answered the call enthusiastically.

For four years, he and his family lived on a war footing. And in the third week of March, something happened to Rob and his family that has no precedent for any American living in the United States since the 19th century: An actual army, bent on actual political conquest and the subjugation of Rob’s family, invaded. Some........

© Washington Examiner