Politics & Power Quote by Alan Dundes

Even in its mild, classroom tone, Dundes is slipping a scalpel under the skin of “common sense.” Calling past-present-future a “tripartite formula” reframes what most Americans treat as neutral reality into something closer to folklore: a culturally preferred template that organizes experience, argument, and identity. The intent is diagnostic. Dundes isn’t marveling at time’s existence; he’s marking the way a society habitually chunks life into threes and then mistakes that pattern for nature.

The subtext is that this temporal triad does cultural work. It supports a particularly American narrative rhythm: origin story (past), urgency (present), and redemption or progress (future). That rhythm shows up everywhere from political speeches to self-help talk: we were once X, we are now Y, we will become Z. It’s a structure that makes persuasion feel inevitable, because it smuggles in directionality. If time is a clean line moving forward, “progress” becomes the default moral frame, and dissent can be painted as regression.

Contextually, Dundes was a folklorist famous for insisting that the everyday patterns people repeat - jokes, sayings, categories - reveal unconscious assumptions. His choice of “worldview” is key: he’s mapping deep grammar, not surface opinion. By pointing to time as a formula, he invites suspicion toward the tidy, managerial way American culture handles history (as a prelude), the present (as a problem to solve), and the future (as a project). It’s a quiet critique of a nation that packages complexity into a three-act story, then lives as if the ending is guaranteed.