In a 1988 memoir recounting his thirty-year tenure as chief Washington correspondent of the Sunday Times, the British journalist Henry Brandon recalled the flicker of disquiet he felt in 1964 as he watched the chaos and extremism of Barry Goldwater’s hard-right presidential campaign. He had wondered, at the time, if it was an omen of things to come.

But looking back at the Goldwater interlude from the sunny vantage point of the Reagan years merely underscored, for Brandon, the fundamental placidity and moderation of American politics. “Despite the outward appearance of disorder and confusion, bordering on turmoil and chaos,” he reflected, “in reality the political shifts as usual were only minor. It was another example of the remarkable stability of the American political scene.”

“The remarkable stability of the American political scene” is not a phrase one is apt to hear these days from British journalists. More typical is what Edward Luce, veteran Washington correspondent of the Financial Times, wrote in a recent column on the Trump administration’s penchant for “incinerating America’s traditions of law, civility and restraint”: “As America prepares to commemorate its 250th anniversary,” he warned, “the republic is flirting with its own funeral.”