America’s century is over. History has not ended. This has become the new conventional wisdom even among the keepers of convention.

The challenge is how America finds real security in this new era. This month, we witnessed two strikingly different answers: one from the self-proclaimed most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump, and one from the champion of the rising populist movement on the left, Senator Bernie Sanders.

Florida lawyer Jalal Shehadeh is convinced that the warrantless seizure of his cell phone by federal agents at the Newark International Airport after he returned from Palestine this September was not random.

Shehadeh, a Miami-based attorney and Palestinian rights advocate, was held for several hours for a secondary inspection and had his phone seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) after he refused to allow federal agents to search it.

Estela Díaz and 2-year-old Eber repeat their routine every morning: Around 8 a.m., he rustles her awake in the bed they share. She picks him up, changes his diaper, and pulls out a fresh set of tiny clothes. While Estela dresses him, Eber coos, “Mama, mama.” She smiles and strokes his cheeks, trying to hide her sadness at his confusion. Estela is 50 and has three sons, but Eber is not one of them. She’s been caring for him because ICE deported his parents to Venezuela, despite his mother’s pleas to be reunited first.

Estela and her husband, Miguel, moved to Mobile, Alabama, 20 years ago to raise their own boys in a place that felt safe and had a slower rhythm than Las Vegas, where they’d met. Miguel works as a remodeling contractor. He spent years developing their four-acre property, building a wood shop, a chicken coop, and houses for two of their children (the third lives 15 minutes down the road). They bought peacocks as pets and planted bright perennial gardens, adorning them with stone fountains. By the driveway, they fly an American flag from an antique tractor. Over the years, their home evolved into a kind of retirement sanctuary—until this past winter, when it started to look like a day care.

The lawyer Mike Godwin famously came up with the “law” that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one (or 100%).

Robert P Jones thought long and hard about whether to go there in his latest book. But the more he studied US demographic numbers, considered the rise of Christian nationalism and heard Donald Trump use the language of racial purity, he found the conclusion inescapable. “This is our 1933,” he writes.

There is no greater myth regarding American exceptionalism than the view that only the United States has always seen the promotion of “liberal democracy” as part of its national identity. In actual fact, the United States pledges itself to “liberal democracy” the world over only when its military designs are compromised or stymied. The model was President Woodrow Wilson’s “war to end all wars” during World War I. When Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany in 1917, he famously stated that the “world must be made safe for democracy.”

Wilson understood that the American people were not interested in a conflict as part of a larger geopolitical battle, but would rally around the idea of a moral crusade to permanently eliminate militarism and establish a lasting global peace. President Franklin Roosevelt had the same challenge in trying to bring the United States into World War II, when the nation was reluctant to do so.