ever a tendency toward malaise, but maybe this is some kind of turning point in that respect

There is malaise in the land, but if you look back through history, well, hasn’t such been continual?

https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/268-january-1976/decline-fall-everything/
The magnitude of alienation is arriving at a critical point, threatening to swamp the foundations of our own pacification. In 1974 the Hudson Institute published Overholt and Kahn’s Perceptions of the Quality of Life, which found that “polls show enormously widespread doubt among American citizens regarding America’s most basic governmental and private institutions.” From the same semi-governmental think tank, came Barry Smernoff’s Images of Future American Society, with its similar verdict as to “our worsening cultural malaise” and “spreading alienation.” Also in 1974 appeared a Max Lerner article in Foreign Affairs reporting a pervasive sense of “being at the end of the tether, a mordant feeling of disintegration and decay.”

Yet maybe we’ve entered a period characterized by a certain turning point in the following sense:

After generations of a mystique of progress … not only is there no utopia, but life is just not all so satisfying for the great majority of people.

After some particular phenomena of Hope:
Communism (circa 1890–1990)
Democracy (western liberal democracy; US/EU)

Maybe Trump and the other reactionary populists worldwide represent: end of that Hope.

In which case: a turning point away from Hope.

A discombobulation and disorientation: where to go from here?

If all the “progress and development” now is sensed to be disappointing, has no culmination . . . Hope never realized, never consummated . . . it could be more significant than your persistent historic garden-variety malaise.