Optimism

Trump’s victory in November shocked me and put me in a rather discouraged state of mind.  I worried that this was the beginning of a downward spiral of demagoguery and the decay of American values, ideals and civility.

But in recent days I have seen a rising tide of resistance and resolution that gives me hope for the future.  Trump’s victory, his incredibly childish antics and his mean-spirited directives have awakened a broad movement of outrage and activism.

The political pendulum swings to and fro.  That is the nature of American politics and it is generally a satisfactory if not inspirational phenomenon, sacrificing speed to avoid radical, potentially de-stabilizing changes.  The American experiment has never been a revolution, but rather a continual tinkering with the detailed machinery of governance and public policy, full of compromises and experimental half measures.  The general trend has been toward a more equitable, enlightened and appealing life for all Americans, though certainly there has always been much to improve.

The U.S. citizenship is split almost 50/50 on many of the large policy issues of the day.  This has almost always been true and it must reflect some basic crossroad of human development when one’s sentiments begin to veer in one direction or another and soon the other path is in the murky distance and hardly recognizable.

When the people are at loggerheads on basic issues, it is difficult to gain consensus and it may be impossible to push forward.  This stalemate is frustrating, but perhaps it is better than moving aggressively on new policies and potentially alienating large groups to a point of no return.

Trump and the Republicans have no mandate from the American people.  The fact that the Senate is slightly Republican is a strange artifact of the red state/blue state distribution.  Most of our least populous states are conservative.  They still have two senators.  Even the distribution of representatives has some very peculiar demographic attributes that make it more likely that conservatives can win.  The true picture of how the American people are divided is best portrayed by the popular vote, which despite Trump’s petty claims, show a fairly substantial majority of Americans are opposed to either him, his platform, or both.

It appears that Trump will be at least partially frustrated in his efforts to act upon his campaign promises.  This is only fair, because most of those promises are anathema to a majority of Americans.  His refugee directives, which make no sense whatsoever and are an affront to basic American values, should never be allowed to stand.  Hopefully the judiciary will stand firm and the congress will oppose any new legislative efforts to circumvent the courts.

The efforts to roll back financial and environmental regulations will probably have some success, because these are also Republican hot buttons.  But there will be strong resistance, especially on the environmental front.  Americans are finally waking up to the reality of global climate change, and there is the beginning of an internal Republican challenge to the ‘drill, baby, drill’ mantra.

Health care changes will also be hard fought.  The Republicans have been successful at making the abstract generality of ‘Obamacare’ a bogeyman, but once the details have to be hammered out they will find that sleight of hand will no longer suffice.  In the end, I will not be surprised to see congress only tinker slightly with Obamacare, change the name, confuse the hell out of everyone and declare victory.

It is on foreign policy that Trump is most dangerous and unpredictable.  Here, we can only hope that his early missteps and embarrassments will serve to create a braking action on his tweets, hapless phone calls and pronouncements.  His advisors may be a motley crew of billionaires and Alt-right zealots, but hopefully there will be enough common sense on hand to avoid catastrophic errors.  The U.S. will cease to be a leader in the world for these four years and transition to the role of a bully, but perhaps the damage will be only temporary.  It may actually be healthy for other nations such as Germany, the UK, France and Japan to become more influential and active as leaders in the world.

On the economic front, Trump’s chest-beating and saber-rattling over trade policies and outsourcing will probably have minimal impact.  The economy will evolve, as it almost always does, somewhat independently of the policies that are targeted, with great fanfare, to impact it. 

It seems to me that there is an unavoidable fact that automation is steadily reducing the number of available middle class jobs, and that there is probably no way to compensate by creating ‘new’ industries or jobs.  This is a characteristic of the way that the global economy is evolving and the genie has long since been out of the bottle.  The problem is massive and it will become ever more massive.  Demagoguery, bullying and threats will not solve it.  We can either study it and try to socially engineer changes to lessen or thwart its impact, or we can allow it to create chaos and catapult us into a morass of unstable political and social turmoil. 

I believe Donald Trump has had his moment of glory. It is going to be a long, painful four years, and Trump will tweet himself into ever more pathetic absurdities as he confronts his impotence.  As for his rabid supporters, they will grind their teeth in fury at the resistance that thwarts his every move, but eventually they will grow weary of the Donald’s ineptitude and realize his supposed business acumen either never existed or is totally unsuited for running a country.  They will no longer believe his preposterous claims of being the one and only possible savior.  They will no longer thrill to the inarticulate ravings of political incorrectness that they once somehow found courageous, and they will realize, though probably never admit, that he is just a desperately insecure man who has managed to bully and connive his way to a fortune and hoodwink a lot of people in the process.