The Presidential Wrecking-Ball in Action
This is fascinating (as well as frightening) to me, and yet I have a case to make about Donald Trump’s twice being made president. You’re probably not going to like it, but I’ll make it anyway.
Donald Trump was (and is) the necessary antidote for the slow-cooked and smoldering decline of the American Republic.
Let me first introduce you to what I claim are the elements of that decline.
I come from what many Americans claim are ‘the old days we can never return to.’ Having lived those times, I refute that claim. The 1950s are a mere seventy-five years in America’s rear-view mirror, one third of the lifespan of a nation that, until very recently, was the single place on this earth where most everyone aspired to emigrate.
I was twenty years old in 1955, young and still pretty wet behind the ears, but I was thoughtful even then, and my memories are still clear:
There were two billion people on the planet, now ten billion,
The American Marshall Plan had just enabled the rebuilding of a largely destroyed Europe and Asia,
Soldiers back from WWII earned themselves (and got) free college educations,
We had a graduated tax code that topped out at 92%,
The U.S. had no national debt, and now has accumulated $39 trillion,
Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower were our presidents,
Our industrial strength and production towered above all others,
We had millionaires who gladly paid their taxes, rather than billionaires who bought themselves laws of avoidance,
A bi-partisan Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act, the Federal-aid Highway Act, the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, the Atomic Energy Act, Science, Education & Space Race acts, as well as the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The 1960s that followed weren’t calm.
They were contained tensions, confronting nuclear fears with Russia, and the first cracks in a racial and cultural reordering way too long in coming, that laid the groundwork for the incredible string of assassinations in the 1960s. But we were whole, trusting our government and ourselves because each of us had earned that trust.
During the decade and a half before the Reagan administration, the U.S. seemed strangely economically sluggish, geopolitically uncertain and, like a martini, politically stirred but not yet shaken. The sense, reasonable or not, was of a country slowly losing control over prices, postwar events abroad, and its own prior internal confidence. Jimmy Carter was a lovely guy, but a transitional president between the old liberal politics of the 1960s and an emerging conservative national consensus. In the twenty-four years between Nixon and Clinton, Carter was the Democrat elected.
Reagan’s appeal in the 1980s rested largely on reversing that perception of ennui among the voting public.
But there was manipulation there as well, in that Reagan was an actor, and had the actor’s skills of gazing easily into a camera, learning his lines well, and delivering them with an easy grin and throwaway joke. Reagan didn’t send any factories to China, but his era tilted the system toward globalization, a strong dollar, freer trade, and the corporate incentives that made offshoring to China the rational business decision.
It’s notable that Reagan never personally profited from his office, he was not that class of politician, but his role as an actor led to some pretty serious misbehavior by the CIA in the Middle East and Central America.
Then, following two Reagan terms, the billionaires got their thumbs on the scales and all hell broke loose.
The offshoring of industry to China is a well-known tale and not worth exploring here, beyond the fact that it broke the American Middle Class, including a substantive union movement. The decline of small-town America and working-class jobs set the scene for the coming Trump presidencies a half-century down the calendar.
The Middle Class didn’t go quietly, and both Democrats and Republicans were co-conspirators in its demise. Single wage-earner families disappeared, and standards of living dropped like a rock. The loss of blue-collar jobs required college educations for kids, who then graduated with such debt they could never afford a home.
The generational promise of a better life for kids than their parents became another cruel joke.
After the Supreme Court determined that corporations had the same civil rights as individuals, legislative rights went to the highest bidder, and the rich captained the ship from that day forward. Anger exploded too slowly and quietly for notice, but it grew among the disenfranchised and built, generation after generation.
The stage was set for Donald Trump, and Donald knew from his fourteen-year television career how to engage a crowd. He promised to burn the political house down, and his MAGA followers couldn’t wait to provide the gasoline and matches. “Only I can do this,” he promised, and they rode his horse into a second term. The man who ‘couldn’t possibly win’ went ahead to win, then sat out an election and won again.
Now the pundits all say, ‘he’ll be crushed in the mid-terms,’ but I’m not so sure.
And yet, America is not over, not by a long shot.
We were born a slaveholding nation and survived the end of slavery. It took a Civil War that killed more Americans than all the wars we ever fought, but we survived. Black men and women suffered Jim Crow laws for another hundred years, but we (and they) survived. Two World Wars, further wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and it seems another in Iran, but we survive. We will survive our only truly criminal presidency as well, one way or another, so don’t count us out.
Those who say we can’t go back, haven’t been here long enough to understand how we can.
Time, and time, and time again, we have proven that republican democracy is a winner. It may falter, stumble, even fall on its face, but it has always gotten up and carried on.
Abraham Lincoln broke the chain of new slave states in the mid nineteenth century. Theodore Roosevelt broke the trusts that bound America into servitude in the early twentieth century, and Franklin Roosevelt saved our nation from its worst ever financial collapse, while guiding us through another world War at the same time.
Someone will break the back of the billionaires, or they’ll break their own, because they divided our house, and Lincoln told us…
… “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
We haven’t yet found a leader to right our wrongs in this century, but we have one currently in office who has proven the need.
The rest will come.
It always has.