The great prophets, William Strauss & Neil Howe, may rightly claim to have predicted the phase of American history that began last year. There is real merit to their notion that there are periodic generations of crisis in American history, such as the Civil War-Reconstruction Crisis of the second half of the 19th century and the Depression-World War II Crisis of the first half of the 20th. The notable feature of the current Crisis, aside from the fact it arrived about five years earlier than Strauss & Howe's model predicts, is the vastly superior quality of the political response.

Contrast the coherence and broad popularity of George W. Bush's State of the Union address of January 29, 2002, with the confusion that attended the beginning of the last Crisis in 1929. The Hoover Administration had no idea what to do about the collapse of the national economy. Neither did anybody else, of course, but the administration took the blame. Chaos grew for almost four years. Only when Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in1933 did a broad policy-consensus appear. Elements of that consensus would exacerbate the Crisis later on. The United States came very close to mothballing its military during Roosevelt's first term, and the administration's economic nationalism ensured that the United States and its trading partners would recover far more slowly than they would otherwise have done. Nonetheless, the New Deal did what governments are supposed to do during such a time; it restored confidence in public institutions.

Members of the political class today still have their pre-crisis fixations, the president not the least. In the State of the Union message, President Bush continued to talk about converting part of the Social Security System into private investment accounts. The idea never had much merit, and to mention it today is anachronistic. The era of major privatizations is over, and the stock market on which private accounts would depend is about as popular as dead-for-a-week fish. Moreover, even now that it is certain that the federal budget will run a deficit for the next year or two, the president is still talking about major tax cuts. Running on that issue in 2000, he lost the popular vote.

On the other hand, the president's partisan opponents are reduced to grasping at straws. On the day of the president's address, a column in The New York Times by Paul Krugman argued that the great historical divide of 2001 was not the attacks of September 11, but the bankruptcy of the Enron Corporation. Mr. Krugman, like the entire liberal commentariate, insists that the Bush Administration is responsible for that mishap in some way that is all the more sinister for being unverifiable. Some commentators are trying to turn the treatment of the al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba into a civil-liberties issue. None of this is working. However, the Democrats are not really desperate for a national issue. Unlike the Republicans in the Congressional elections of 1930, they are not being blamed for the onset of the crisis. The rise in confidence in public institutions benefits their incumbents, too.

Indeed, there is so much consensus this time around that you have to wonder where we go from here. The Crisis of the 1930s and 40s started with a shaky attempt to grapple with domestic confusion, but gained clarity with the shift to international issues. In contrast, the Revolutionary Crisis of the 1770s and 80s was international from the start. The leadership then, too, was unusually determined and focused. Domestic questions were not addressed systematically until the end of the period, culminating in the ratification of the Constitution in 1788. The confusion came in the middle, when Americans tried to resist the fact that being an independent nation required a genuine national government. The current Crisis may have a similar structure.

In his State of the Union Address, President Bush in effect issued a conditional declaration of universal war. For countries to do certain things, even within their own borders, puts them at war with the United States. Indeed, the address was less like a statement of foreign policy than a planetary executive order.

Given the lethal nature and universality of the threat, the president could have done no less. The problem is that the United States is not set up to provide world government, or even to participate in one. Moreover, the president's program of winning the clash of civilizations by spreading democracy to Islamic countries requires a rollback of American multiculturalism. American cultural leaders are ready for that emotionally, but a new consensus still has to be worked out in detail. Also, let us not forget that the war is putting many domestic inevitabilities on hold, from a national health insurance system to a reform of the electoral college. All these things will become issues again later in the Crisis, when the initial terrorist phase is concluded.