For those living in Western societies, especially in the English-speaking countries today, it can often seem that political stability, economic growth, and a standard of living unmatched in human history resulting from this combination is as natural as night following day. After all, in the last 150 years in America and roughly 300 years in the U.K., there has not been a serious sustained crisis of governing legitimacy. To be sure, there have been ineffective governments (and monarchs) during this time, but these systems have shown themselves adept at evolving over time to meet the changing needs and demands of the population. In the case of the U.S., just the fact that the Republican Party and the Democrat Party have been the only two relevant political parties during 150 years of an electoral system that is largely the same (since the Civil War) is something that cannot be matched anywhere in the world. In other words, if someone passed away in 1870 and was brought back today, only in the U.S.  would they see a democratic system largely the same as the one that they left in 1870.

Given that this achievement is so rare, one would think that it would be celebrated. But in the U.S., it would seem that this achievement has led to complacency of the governing class. By taking this state of affairs for granted, the governing class has taken its positions for granted and has largely ignored large swaths of the population, which has led to today’s crisis in governing legitimacy.

Don’t ever doubt it. We are in a massive crisis of legitimacy, and it really doesn’t seem that the political class gets it. To listen to many, it seems as if they think that Donald Trump is the problem. If they can just get rid of him, then things can go back to their natural order. In fact, these folks remind me of the first phase of the financial crisis when real estate values started to decline sharply, but banks hadn’t yet started collapsing. During this period of a few months when things were slowing down but had not yet reached crisis levels, folks were hopefully asserting that a 10% decline in real estate values meant that we were near the market bottom. Like the political class today, they viewed the situation as transitory and that it was just a matter of getting this cyclical downturn over with and go back to making money again. After all, in 25 years we had only experiences 2 relatively mild downturns. Economic growth & a rising tide that lifts all boats was the natural order. They couldn’t yet appreciate that they were on the cusp of a generation-defining economic cataclysm.

The problem that we have today, I think, is one of perspective. We are used to looking at historical time periods from a distance. And in viewing factors that seem obvious in hindsight, it can be hard to appreciate that those in the moment couldn’t necessarily appreciate the changes that they were living through until much later. Because of the unusual stability of our system, it doesn’t seem that our political class fully appreciates what is happening, likely because we don’t have experience living with unstable political/economic systems.

Consequently, it appears that we have a situation where one-half of the political spectrum (the left) appears to think that it can effectively either culturally suppress & delegitimize, if not actually outlaw, many (if not all) of the views/desires of the other half of the political spectrum (the right). This thinking can only exist where the stability of the system is taken for granted. Anyone else would see immediately that an attempt to marginalize/outlaw roughly half your population (especially when that particular half is armed) while at the same time maintaining the political stability, economic growth potential, and geographical integrity of that society is doomed to failure.

The problem isn’t just that your society will break apart into separate enclaves. It is that the process of breaking apart can be violent, vicious, and damaging to point that the economic and political potential of the society will never be the same. Put more bluntly, many who are alive at the beginning of the process won’t be after the process has played itself out.

In addition, as the Soviet Union showed us, a seemingly stable, built-for-the-ages system can unravel within a very short period of time. This happens when a governing class either doesn’t recognize or doesn’t address the fundamental problems of its people. A governing class that is failing in this regard, in a democratic system at least, gets Donald Trump. A governing class that continues to ignore the warning that is President Trump may wake up one day to find that it governs nothing. In other words, loss of governing legitimacy will ultimately mean loss of governing power. Not through an election, but through a process that will be undoubtedly unstable, possibly quick (we can hope), and likely very ugly.