Where We Stand from Where I Sit

I wish it were possible to give a rosy year-end assessment of the state of our nation, but the enormity of the disaster that befell the United States on November 5 makes that impossible. Still, while we are surely in extremely dire straits, the future is not preordained. Optimism would be grievously misplaced, but there are some unknowns that bear watching.

The first is whether Trump can maintain the loyalty of those who put him in office. A recent Washington Post article, “After Backing Trump, Low-Income Voters Hope He Doesn’t Slash Their Benefits,” discussed “the struggling Pennsylvania city of New Castle.” The residents there, half of whom are under the poverty line, bought into Trump’s promise to eviscerate inflation but are now nervous that the federal services they enjoyed under the Biden administration—and obviously took for granted—might be eviscerated as well. One woman in her fifties declared, without irony, “Trump is more attuned to the needs of everyone instead of just the rich. I think he knows it’s the poor people that got him elected, so I think he is going to do more to help us.”

It is unnecessary to point out how tragically naïve such sentiments are, but they are indicative of a larger issue that has not been sufficiently explored.

Pundits on both sides have repeatedly observed that Trump’s Republican Party has broken all norms and does not even remotely adhere to the traditional values and methods of what went before. In many ways that is true but in one highly significant feature it is not.

Since well over a century ago, when the two parties settled into what have been their underlying philosophies, Republicans have sought to keep the class system stretched out while Democrats have tried to compress it. Going as far back as Grover Cleveland, Democrats have courted the votes of the working class, while Republicans as far back as William McKinley favored wealth and property. Even famed trust-buster Theodore Roosevelt was far cozier with business leaders and the rich—his class—than is generally assumed.

And so, whether it be the New Deal, the Fair Deal, or the Great Society, with programs such as Social Security, Medicare, the GI Bill, Food Stamps, student loans, and even voting rights, it has been Democrats, generally over Republican opposition, who have championed government programs that favored the lower classes, thus providing them the means to lead healthier and more productive lives.

With that came an improved ability to move up, to challenge the status quo, thereby lowering the barriers of social mobility. Republicans, on the other hand, have traditionally attempted to maintain those barriers as they were, to keep the rich rich and the poor poor.

In that, Republicans have not changed one bit.

Trump, if he has any sense at all, will try to mollify voters in places like New Castle, but it is difficult to see how a man who holds such people in contempt—they are, after all, “losers”—can find a way past both his prejudices and his inclinations and keep his word, any more than he cares about buyers of his tawdry products once they have plunked down their cash for a useless return.

For the woman from New Castle to be correct, Trump would have to abandon two of his favorite strategies, tariffs and mass deportations, both of which will raise, not lower, prices. Couple that with a promise to limit federal spending honchoed by that other noted man of the people, Elon Musk, and you have a recipe for New Castle to continue its decline.

But will it matter? Even if these Trump voters finally wake up and realize who their hero really is, will they be able to do anything about it, or will the rules have been altered so much by that time that even large-scale defections will have no effect?

It is important to bear in mind that, regardless of the hollow pronouncements of some left-wing politicians and media talking heads, no, we have not been through this before. Not ever. In other times of great division, such as the run-up to the Civil War or the fascist threat in the 1930s, never did so many Americans choose to not only reject the current governing party, but also to abandon (although many are too ignorant of both history and the present to know it) the basic foundation on which the nation rests.

In addition, in those crisis periods, the country was divided by specific issues, the first being slavery and the second a genuine depression. Regardless of their grousing, those who voted for Trump on economic grounds face nowhere near the hardships present during FDR’s first term, including 20% unemployment, mass foreclosures, and widespread near starvation.

This time around, Trump voters opted to turn out the party that not only pulled the nation through the pandemic without the huge recession predicted by most economists, but also added millions and millions of jobs, attacked failing infrastructure, brought down drug prices, and helped stalemate America’s most threatening enemy. They chose instead a lying blowhard who has betrayed virtually everyone foolish enough to trust him.

The reason is pure ignorance. Never have there been so many sources of information, yet never has the nation been so ill-informed. Perhaps that is because obtaining information used to require at least some effort, in most cases, reading, a pursuit in which fewer and fewer Americans indulge. While there was television and radio news, programs tended to be brief so almost everyone read newspapers. Print journalism was not always reliable, surely, and could be scurrilous, but compared to Facebook, X, and TikTok…

Now that the New Castle voters decided to hand the reins of government over to their traditional enemies, giving them full control of all three branches of government, they have ensured that America will be a very bad place for a very long time.

In the long term, we may succeed in coming back, but the only force that can mitigate the effects in the short term is further division.

Among Republicans.

As the recent vote on the debt ceiling indicated, some conservatives are not fully on board with anointing Trump president for life. Given what is already an extremely muddled agenda, they could well propel the country further into chaos and create severe economic distress. If that transpires, it is possible that, with intelligent and compassionate leadership on the left, a groundswell popular revolt just might push the country a bit back to the middle.

Hoping for dysfunction is an odd New Year’s wish indeed, but it is difficult to see how else the country can be shaken out of the national delusion that would prompt a poor, middle-aged woman in rural Pennsylvania to insist that Donald Trump cares about her.