How does the following quote apply to the United States between 1980 and the present? It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven.

Although the two cities of Dickens's title refer explicitly to London and Paris, they also suggest that each city itself is comprised of two very different cities or worlds, separated by social class and economic inequality. The excesses of the Terror were a reaction to the impunity of aristocrats such as Monseigneur the Marquis St. Evrémonde in his killing of Gaspard's child.
In the contemporary United States, the Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, has been rising steadily to levels unseen since the Gilded Age with CEOs making over three hundred times the wage of an average worker. While real wages for average workers are stagnating, the Republican-led Congress has passed tax cuts for large corporations and the very wealthy while weakening the social safety net and support for children, the poor, the elderly, and the sick in order to subsidize tax breaks for the wealthy. In response to this, the country is becoming politically fractured, with alt-right populists advocating authoritarianism and isolationism, and trying to turn back the clock on the rights of ethnic minorities, women, and LBGTQ people, and the left wing increasingly energized in defense of those rights.
While many of the poor struggle for access to basic healthcare and adequate food and water, the United States is also undergoing a wave of "techno-optimism," which assumes that the world is moving forward into a "heaven" in which AI and automation will somehow create a paradise on earth, an optimism very similar to the Victorian faith in "Progress."
As for incredulity, despite high educational attainment in the country, the majority of students are unable to distinguish real from fake news. Conspiracy theories, anti-vaccination movements, quack health fads, and other forms of incredulity and naive belief in unreliable sources flourish.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/justcapital/2017/10/10/what-is-just-when-it-comes-to-ceo-to-average-worker-pay/

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