(ii) that America's problems can be solved by the application of governmental power: Americans' distrust of politicians and government officials grew dramatically in the years following 1975. Further, they came to believe that government efforts to solve social problems not only fail but often are worse than the disease. For these reasons, the electorate came to endorse the position stated most succinctly by Ronald Reagan, who in his first Inaugural Address (1981) declared that "government is not the e solution to the problem. Government is the problem."

(iii) that America is a nation devoted to fostering greater equality for its people, despite differences in race, sex, ethnicity, religion, culture, or sexual orientation: The effort to realize the nation's commitment to equality at first continued in the late 1970s, as government developed affirmative action policies to provide remedies for past discrimination against members of minority groups. But more and more Americans viewed affirmative action as "reverse discrimination" favoring certain individuals based on race, and thus against other (white male) individuals based on race, even as the Supreme Court struggled to sort out which affirmative action policies were consistent with the Constitution and which were not.

(a) Opponents of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment thwarted its progress through state legislatures and ultimately, in 1982, defeated it. This was a shattering setback for the cause of women's rights because ERA had swept through Congress with no trouble in 1972 and seemed destined for swift adoption. The case against ERA was only a specific application of a broader critique of feminism and the demand for equal rights for women. Grounded in "traditional" religious and moral values, understandings of the roles of men and women, and disapproval of changing sexual mores, the anti-feminist movement derived most of its support from fundamentalist religious groups and right-wing politicians and their supporters. The defeat of ERA, a profound setback for the women's movement, reverberated throughout American society, combining with the opposition to affirmative action to create a backlash against the use of law and government to remedy past injustices or to enforce equality under the Constitution.

(b) The drive to extend the protection of the Constitution to the right of privacy, including the right of private decision-making in matters of sex and procreation, reached its constitutional high-water-mark in 1973, the year the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, which extended the constitutional right of sexual privacy to cover a woman's choice whether or not to terminate her pregnancy by an abortion. (Although Roe v. Wade might seem more properly to belong in Unit XI, it became controversial only once the American people began to focus on it after the passing of the twin traumas of Watergate and Vietnam.) Roe v. Wade galvanized conservative and right-wing groups who maintained that abortion was murder, and rejected on that basis any possibility that a pregnant woman should have the right to choose whether to continue her pregnancy or not. The conflict over abortion grew beyond anything that pro-choice or pro-life factions expected, to become a dominant issue of American public life -- although one that, to this day, still has not achieved a definitive resolution one way or the other.

To be sure, the "melting pot" ideology that had dominated American thinking on immigration and cultural identity was vulnerable to sharp and justified criticism. It both embodied and symbolized pressure to conform to some hypothetical standard of "Americanization" -- pressure that caused many immigrants to abandon their cultural, religious, and ethnic heritage; forget or scrap their native tongues; and change their names -- and even their appearances -- to win acceptance from the "majority." Moreover, those immigrants who did not jettison their entire cultural identity found themselves living double lives -- living as "Americans" in the world outside the home and in the culture of their birth within the home.

Nonetheless, despite its many flaws and the extensive human damage attributable to it, the idea of the "melting pot" did carry with it one valuable principle worth salvaging from the wreck -- that all Americans, of whatever race, creed, ethnicity, or culture, were of right citizens of the United States with a common political and constitutional heritage. The growing fragmentation of the American people endangers this principle, and this continuing challenge to the idea that Americans of whatever race, religion, ethnicity, or sex nonetheless have common interests as Americans in many ways is the most serious trial the nation faces.

The growing splintering of the American people into groups has fostered, in turn, a growing insistence by many of those groups on redefining the Americans' "shared" or "common" heritage. On the right are ranged advocates of "traditional" core curricula, which they claim are the only dependable backbone of a sound educational system. On the left are ranged advocates of "multicultural" curricula, which they argue redress the imbalance of "traditional" curricula in favor of dead white males of European descent. But this contest is also a battle over the values animating education -- "traditional" values (often closely linked to conservative and fundamentalist religion) versus an emphasis on diversity of religious beliefs and moral values and on a "realistic" approach to the kinds of values and behaviors that schools should foster in their students.

(v) Still other interests and distinctions divide the American people as well:

(a) The new immigration: Census results in the 1980s and the 1990s confirm that the largest and fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States is the Hispanic-Americans, an umbrella term that includes people who can trace their ancestry to countries throughout Latin America (for example, Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Puerto Rico) as well as to Spain. Many of these Americans either are bilingual in Spanish and English or are fluent only in Spanish -- leading, on the one hand , to pressure to launch bilingual programs in schools and government and, on the other, to demands that English receive legal or even constitutional sanction as the official language of the United States. (Just as many Hispanic-Americans either are so totally assimilated that they refuse to speak Spanish, or are the children of assimilated parents who refused to teach them Spanish at home.) Asian-Americans of all sorts (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, Pakistani) rank just behind Hispanic Americans as a fast-growing force in American life. This demographic development is especially significant because many Asian-Americans have brought with them their own religions (such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Shinto) -- faiths profoundly different from the Judeo-Christian tradition that helped to shape most of the nation's history. Among other things, the growth of these segments of the nation's population indicates that those of European descent may well become a minority not only among American immigrants, but of the American population.

(b) The aging of America: Census results also confirm that, as the massive bulge in the population representing the so-called "baby boom" (those Americans born between 1946 and 1962) ages, more and more Americans will be dependent on the Social Security system, which will be funded by taxes paid by fewer and fewer Americans -- members of the "baby bust" (those born in the 1960s and early 1970s) and the "second baby boom" (children of the "baby boom" generation, born in the late 1970s and 1980s). Not only will this major age shift affect the Social Security system; it also will pose important challenges to the nation's public and private systems for providing and paying for health care.

(c) The health care crisis: The national crisis over affordable and available health care goes beyond concerns derived from the aging of America. The sheer expense of health costs and the alarming growth in the number of Americans lacking even basic health insurance have surfaced periodically in debates over American health policy. For more than three decades, the growing recognition of cancer as a major killer of Americans has spurred efforts to find a cure -- with only partial success and an uncertain future. Still another issue that drives public debate about health care is the spread of AIDS, a sexually-transmitted disease that, to date, is invariably fatal and at this writing has no cure.

(d) The environmental crisis: The plight of the environment was first brought to public attention in the early 1960s by Rachel Carson's landmark book Silent Spring (1962); it first captured widespread interest in 1970, with the first "Earth Day." Although the modern environmental movement tapped into a long and honorable tradition of "stewardship" thinking about the environment (going back to the Progressive era's Ballinger-Pinchot controversy), it scored its principal successes in the 1970s, with the adoption of environmental legislation and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. It also set out, with less success, to educate Americans about their nation's status as the world's leading consumer of natural resources and raw materials and to encourage conservation, recycling, and a less expansive way of life. In the 1980s, however, environmentalism came under sustained attack, on a variety of grounds, from the right wing of American politics. Critics of environmentalism dismissed environmentalists' warnings against global warming, air and water pollution, toxic waste dumps, the destruction of forests, the wholesale extinction of animal and plant life, and the deterioration of the earth's ozone layer as alarmist, anti-business, and a anti-human. This debate still rages, as the nation tries to come to terms with its obligations to its people and to the rest of the world.

(e) The human costs of an ailing economy:

(1) Homelessness in the 1980s and 1990s became an increasingly visible national problem, on a scale rivaling the era of the Great Depression. Traceable to, among other factors, the movement in the 1970s to deinstitutionalize many mental patients, the growing dearth of affordable housing, and the ordinary American's increasingly precarious economic health, homelessness cannot be dismissed any longer as a "phony" national problem.

(2) Substance abuse, for most of the nation's history ignored because it tended to affect only the inner cities (and because alcoholism and smoking were not considered part of the problem until the last twenty years), spread throughout the nation -- a reaction, in part, to the gutting of the economy in many regions. The collapse of industries in the "rust belt" of New England and the Middle West, and the apparently quick and easy money to be made in drug trafficking, have combined to make drug abuse one of the principal problems afflicting American society -- despite nearly three decades of sustained federal, state, and local efforts to combat traffic in dangerous drugs.

(3) Violent crime- of which drug traffic is only one instance -- continued to preoccupy Americans, and to provide a focus for political argument. Two camps emerged to debate the crime problem with growing acrimony but little progress to any sort of solution: One group, based mainly along the right wing of the political spectrum, maintained that government should "get tough" with criminals, concentrating on apprehending those who commit crime and punishing them more severely (including an expanded use of the death penalty). The other, occupying mostly the left wing, argued that crime was a phenomenon whose roots could be traced to larger social ills; they maintained that the most effective response to crime would be to combat homelessness, unemployment, and other social problems, and to control individual citizens' access to firearms, rather than "locking criminals up."

One of the principal reasons for the American people's growing disenchantment with, and distrust of, politics and politicians is the growing inability and unwillingness of all too many politicians, of whatever party or point of view, to come to grips with the problems that alarm Americans most. Ironically, one of the principal reasons for American politicians' failure to confront national problems is their astute perception that most Americans either do not want to face the details of those problems, the hard work needed to devise solutions, and the necessity of accepting social costs as the price of those solutions.