The Case For Optimism

Ezra Klein writes a very good summary - much of which I think I agree with - about how Trumpistan is not the worst era in American history.  I certainly feel like Trump should be the final gasp of a dying white supremacist America.  His supporters are older, they are a clear minority of the population and, as Klein points out, Trump is such a vulgar figure that he's laying all the ugliness of white supremacist politics out for us to be reviled by.  Some Bernie Sanders supporters actually welcome this epoch, because it "heightens the contradictions" and exposes the core truths of the modern "conservative" movement, a movement that is more reactionary than it has defined itself in polite conversation.  This, of course, is easier to do if you're a relatively comfortable white guy than a 16 year old DREAMer whose parents face deportation to a country where they might be killed.

Klein's central point is very valid: Moments of racial progress (really any progress) create their own backlash.  I saw someone else denigrating Arthus Schlesinger's argument that increased racial and cultural identity threatened America's "vital center."  But Schlesinger was also the historian who posited that there was a "cycle of reform" in American politics.  As we enfranchise and empower historically oppressed groups, the dominant white power structure - especially the marginal people of that structure - will fight back.  They did in Reconstruction.  But the trusts fought back against the Progressives under Harding and Coolidge.  Reagen tried to unravel the Great Society (and the civil rights movement). 

America is changing.  That provides a great deal of energy among those working class whites who had one thing going for them: their whiteness.  The most brutal segregationists were usually the poorest whites, because their very whiteness was their one, true advantage.  That's mostly gone, and what's left will erode soon.

The possible quibble I have - and Klein admits as much - is that perhaps this is moment when America fails.  As America stops becoming a majority white nation, perhaps it can't survive as a state.  But, as Daniel Webster argued during a similar crisis, how would we separate?  Where would we draw the line?  Perhaps instead, this will lead to a time of American decline.  While Trump's incompetence and stupidity - whether on the Iran deal or the Paris Accords - has created its own set of immediate and long term problems, perhaps our politics just continues to break so much that America will no longer be able to exercise it's vision among the other nations of the world.

Maybe we are broken, and Trump didn't break us.  He's just the indicator of the fracture.