(Turning Points Appear To Be Reversible, But They Aren’t)

This is the second installment of a two-part series

So, if Donald Trump isn’t reversible, why not? The first reason has to do with the way people are reacting to his election. Whatever the months since the election have shown us, they have shown us first that personality and temperament aside, Donald Trump is a generic Republican in many ways. In other words, most of what he has actually done (as opposed to his rhetoric) are things that virtually any Republican President would have done. To the extent that his actions and policies have differed from other Republicans, they have differed in a leftward direction (personal support for gay marriage and no desire to make it illegal again, less free trade, etc). The continued resistance on the left is not to a fascist (to the extent that term means anything other than “something I hate”), but rather to a Republican President. From the attempts to intimidate the Electoral College, to judges overruling the travel pause (don’t call it a ban, because that is not what it actually is) simply because Donald Trump issued it, people are refusing to accept the outcome of a legitimate election. Given that there is no evidence that Russia “hacked” the election in the sense that they manipulated vote totals, this election was legitimate.  What people are doing is actually refusing to accept, as Americans have traditionally done, an outcome inconsistent with their desires. Instead, we get leaks, protests, and mob violence, precisely the sort of things that one sees in banana republics. The fact is that this just gives license to those on the other side who will do the same things, and feel justified in doing it the next time that their candidate does win. We don’t go back from that.

The second reason is that the factors that led to Donald Trump have been building for decades. I am not just talking about sections of the country that have been ignored as jobs have moved overseas, it is also the cultural snobbery comes at these folks through the national media and film industries that has been grating. After George W. Bush won reelection in 2004, in large part from a surge in what the press dubbed “values voters”(i.e. religious, traditional people), the press started to make some noises about trying to understand these folks. Nothing came of it. Instead, the press and the cultural elite have been content (and in some cases gleeful) in describing these struggling people as backwards, hateful, misogynist, and stupid for holding to a whole laundry list political opinions and values that the elite has no use for. These folks sense that the elite hate them, wish they weren’t there, and that the elite feel these folks deserve to be mocked, abused, and have bad things happen to them for thinking the way that they do. Furthermore, these folks feel put upon for holding values and opinions that virtually all of America held 30 years ago (and in the case of same-sex marriage, a position that virtually every Democrat leader held at some point in their lives). In short, they feel mistreated, and the cultural elite honestly do give off the impression that these forgotten people deserve to be mistreated.

The third reason we aren’t going back is that the institutions of government are more and more being politicized and being turned against one specific segment of the political spectrum. The IRS, a feared organization, has been used to suppress conservative political activities for several years. And even if you don’t believe that to be the case, conservatives do, and that is all that matters. Conservatives have tended to be the law & order party. Believing that you are being targeted for no other reasons than your political beliefs is a quick way to learn contempt for governmental agencies and the people who inhabit them. And recently, an attempted mass assassination for Republican members of Congress was basically minimized by the FBI as a political matter. Again, perception is everything, and the perception of many on the right is that law enforcement doesn’t really give a s**t if conservatives get shot. The point is that conservatives are ceasing to view the U.S. government as legitimate. Those on the left are yelling that Donald Trump is “Not My President”. Increasingly those on the right are starting to look at Washington and think “Not My Government”.

In conclusion, the deterioration of the socio-political environment in this has been driven by a decline in trust. Although trust in institutions has been declining for 40 years, most of this decline (politically speaking) was in the area of politicians. However, now it appears that large fractions of conservatives are starting to lose faith in the fundamental fairness of the governing institutions themselves. This sort of trust is not easy to rebuild and would require a shake-up in very people staffing these agencies, the likes of which no Western country has seen. This is not likely to happen. Consequently, the country that we had before has changed irrevocably, with all of the baggage that is likely to bring.