How to make sense of America’s turbulent times? In my role as historian, I tried on period costumes: togas for the death of the Roman Republic, tri-colored cockades for the French Revolution, grey military caps for the Insurrection of the Confederacy, jackboots for Hitler’s Nazi Putsch. Then, I remembered my graduate school training in Russian history and Vladimir Lenin’s grotesquely unreadable but deeply influential treatise entitled “State and Revolution.”
