The truth of America and the West in the first decades of the twenty-first century, a truth that helped give us the Trump presidency but will still be an important truth when he is gone, is that we have not been hurtling anywhere—except maybe in a circle. Instead, we are aging, comfortable and stuck, cut off from the past and no longer optimistic about the future, spurning both memory and ambition while we await some saving innovation or revelation, burrowing into cocoons from which no chrysalis is likely to emerge, growing old unhappily together in the glowing light of tiny screens.