OK, big conjecture time. Put pretentiously, this is my Grand Unified Theory of organic political response to crisis in North American and Western European societies: a generalized, free-floating sense of crisis tends to drive majority populations toward the nativist right, and the usual search for convenient scapegoats, but curiously, as a crisis intensifies locally, sentiment passes through some phase transition that activates, instead, instincts toward mutual aid and expressions of solidarity.
