It is possible that what we are going through now, with the vicious polarization of politics all over the developed world, fake news, a plague of sexual harassment cases, and so on, is temporary. Have you ever thought that? Nobody ever does, about something happening at the moment. If things look really bad, well, it’s the end of the world.
But I think we may be in a moment of transition, and the resurgence of far right and nationalist movements may be an aberration, a last gasp of a set of cultural values that has lost it’s place. (That’s why it seems so vicious: the true believers are lashing out in frustration at a culture that seems to marginalize them. It does marginalize them.)
They will prevail.
No they won’t. They would prevail if the world is what they think it is and their solutions resolve many pressing issues, like unemployment, poverty, inequality, pollution, North Korea, Iran, global warming, school violence, low achievement scores, loneliness, and so on. If the world is not what they think it is, their “solutions” will go haywire, and things will get worse, and the majority of us will gradually realize that there was a reason why we used to elect people who appear to be smart and competent.
Perhaps, we’ll even learn that progress is slow-moving and incremental, and almost never revolutionary and sudden.
It is possible that when things go wrong, people will say, well, it would have been even worse than that if we hadn’t elected a Trump, if we hadn’t reduced regulations, if we hadn’t burned more coal. Unfortunately, that is entirely possible: never underestimate the power of denial among invested people. They will then find a new Trump and give him a bigger majority in Congress, and we’ll be all in.
I think it is equally possible that Trump may vaccinate us against future Trumps, just as Hoover vaccinated America against Alf Landon and Wendell Willkie.
I have heard some reasonable people argue that while Trump may not end warfare as we know it, resolve the Palestinian issue in the Middle East, improve the world’s hygiene, and win a Nobel Peace Prize, he may have a moderately successful presidency with good economic growth and low unemployment and might actually get re-elected in 2020.
But the people surrounding Trump are really not very smart. He has gutted the foreign service, for example, refusing to learn from Clinton’s experience: he did the same thing and it resulted in the U.S. losing a great deal of influence on events in Africa and Asia, and Europe and Latin America, and was later reckoned as a big mistake. The Chinese are very busy out there, making friends and influencing people, while America sits back with their hands in their pockets. Scott Pruitt will be remembered, without a doubt, as the worst E.P.A. administrator in history, not just for his intent– which is to hand over every piece of wilderness in America to oil and coal companies– but because he doesn’t really know what he’s doing– he’s not even very effective at handing it over, and it is thought that most of his regulatory moves will eventually be overturned in court. He is laying the groundwork for numerous legal challenges and has made his department a laughing stock.
As for foreign policy, there is nowhere to go. If Trump breaks the Iran deal, Iran will proceed to develop nuclear weapons while the U.S. sits steaming in a pile of it’s own verbiage. The U.S. is not going to invade Iran– nobody wants one more war (especially since we haven’t extracted ourselves from the last two or three). We might see a few bombing runs, but that could lead to trouble: Iran is not impotent.
North Korea is not going to give up it’s missiles. It will not happen. The U.S. will be led on a magical mystery tour to nowhere. When they finally realize they’ve been had, Trump will blame Obama.
Unemployment is down. Thanks Obama. The economy is moving along, but, so far, all of the benefits appear to be going to the rich, the share-holders and owners, not to the working classes with the McJobs, mortgages, and credit card bills– let alone their inadequate health care coverage.
How far will Trump go with his neanderthal trade policies? Everything you buy today has a global connection, all of which provide efficiencies that have been forever lost to nationalist trade policies. It may be ugly at times– consider child labour in Indonesia, India, and Bangladesh– but nations like South Korea, the Philippines, and India are beginning to prosper because of trade, and they will gradually humanize their labour policies as they become more affluent.
Ideas like the Universal Basic Income have already gained some traction. There is more to come as we begin to cope with the possibility of robots doing more and more jobs, and with the realization that without a prosperous middle class, nobody is going to be selling anything.
[whohit]Equilibrium[/whohit]