You basically got a sense of it. The article assumes attachment to these premises: 1. The United States, as a nation, is or was fundamentally good. 2. Econom

You basically got a sense of it. The article assumes attachment to these premises: 1. The United States, as a nation, is or was fundamentally good. 2. Economic liberalism(capitalist society - free markets, private property, etc.) is fundamentally good. 3. Traditional society and its communities(religion, family structure, etc.) was fundamentally good. 4. The political unity that defined the post-war US was fundamentally good. Then the arguments made are based around the deviation from these unquestioned norms. If these things are good, then the politicians are bad - on both sides - because they instigated and escalated division, and must also take all the blame for economic problems because they allowed the outsourcing of labor, and for social problems because they allowed more women and immigrants in the workforce and disrupted the traditional society. Note that I list four assumptions, not five. That's because the politics are listed as a crisis separate from national identity. The rest of the article is summaries of these deviations, which you have surely read in other articles. The author concludes with "we must agree these things are the issue before we can rebuild a society".