“What Trump Showed Us About America”, Politico Magazine

Chris Buskirk is editor and publisher of American Greatness.

One thing has become very clear to me in the past four years: With stagnant wages real, the American middle class is in trouble, it has been for a long time and it’s getting worse. That is causing social and political turmoil that no one of either party who holds power is equipped to address. Rising wealth inequality—first slow and lately fast—as a result of stagnating real economic growth beginning around 1970 and other structural demographic forces, is producing a situation that is unsustainable.

If this situation persists, we will experience more government patrimonialism accompanied by increasing factional conflict. This is not, strictly speaking, an ideological issue along a traditional right-left political spectrum. It has been partially described by some as a class conflict (ruling class vs. country class, globalists vs. deplorables, anywhere vs. somewheres), as a racial conflict, as an education gap, as a spiritual deficit, and so forth. There are elements of all of these things, but many of these conflicts are initiated or at least intensified by a lack of long-term economic growth. The frustration and broken dreams that occur when children can’t do as well as their parents are at odds with the expectations we’ve been promised and with our understanding of what America is and should be. This produces persistent social and political conflict that undermines American solidarity.

Even wise political leaders would have a difficult time successfully navigating these issues. But for now, the political class remains trapped in an out-of-date framework: one that assumes science is still advancing quickly, that productivity growth driven by scientific advance will continue to make the economy grow indefinitely, and that the United States is still the world hegemon that can use the massive preponderance of its wealth and power to get its way on everything. In reality, this obsolete worldview is more likely to exacerbate our structural problems than to resolve them.

Melissa Deckman is chair and professor of political science at Washington College.

Donald Trump’s election in 2016 helped to foster higher levels of political engagement among Generation Z, particularly young women, many of whom were angered by the country’s willingness to elect a man with a penchant for demonizing women and other marginalized groups. It wasn’t just Trump’s bombastic style, however, that galvanized many young people politically. His administration’s rejection of science, its refusal to address gun violence and its dismissal of youth-led racial, gender and LGBTQ equality movements have been wholly out of step with the priorities of this generation, who are growing up with existential concerns about systemic racism, the well-being of the planet and mass shootings in their schools and on their streets.

What’s unique about Gen Z is that they have brought unparalleled organizational tools to their brand of progressive activism. Teens and young adults have borne witness to the success of youth leaders fighting against climate change and the March for Our Lives movement, inspiring the creation of similar offshoot organizations, both in their own communities and on-line. Social media also has provided an excellent venue for the mobilization of younger voters—including during a pandemic, when voting became more complicated for all Americans.

While older Americans still turned out at higher numbers this election cycle, exit polls show that the youth vote was much higher in 2020 than four years ago. Young voters also preferred the Biden/Harris ticket by a 25-point margin, their support critical in battleground states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania. This nascent generation’s allegiance to the Democratic Party is far from certain, particularly if Democratic leaders are slow to address their progressive concerns. And there are pockets of Gen Z that lean more conservative on many issues, particularly young white men. However, if these voting and activism patterns hold in the future, we could see a leftward surge in policy in the years to come, particularly as Gen Z becomes a bigger part of the electorate.

Steven M. Teles is professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and author, with Robert P. Saldin, of Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites.

Asignificant chunk of the American people are radically unsure of whether they want to live in America as it actually exists. Political scientists often get at this through the concept of “negative partisanship”—when attachment to a political party is driven more by aversion to the other party than commitment to your own party’s governing program. But I think there is something deeper going on.

The United States includes places with very different ways of governing the economy, whether taxes, services, regulation or unionization. On a deeper level, the United States includes highly secular, ethnically diverse big cities whose culture is shaped by the elite media and universities. But it also includes a wide swathe of places where the culture of white Christianity still shapes the worldview and organizes people’s lives, and which defines itself increasingly in contrast to what they think is the ethos of big cities.

America is a huge country that cannot be governed in the way that smaller, more homogenous states can. Too many Democrats allowed themselves to imagine that they could use the rising ethnic minority population of the United States as a battering ram to impose the form of governance of American cities on the rest of the country. But it turns out that Hispanic and Black Americans are not as homogeneous as that strategy imagined. Trumpists thought that they could elect a sort of strongman who would put the experts and increasingly assertive racial minorities in their place. But that didn’t work either. I am unsure whether the aspiration of either side of our culture war to be free from having to live with the rest of America has been extinguished. But the ambiguous results of this election just might show that we will have to find ways to live with the ideologically, racially, economically and religiously diverse America that actually exists.

Michiko Kakutani is the author of the new book Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Re-Read. Follow her on Twitter @michikokakutani and on Instagram @michi_kakutani.

“The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” During Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House, many Americans had reason to worry that de Tocqueville’s observation would be proved wrong—that Trump’s assault on our institutions and the massive propaganda and disinformation campaign run by him and his enablers would mortally wound our democracy and subvert our Constitution, along with our values and ideals.

Trump’s nearly four years in office have exposed weaknesses in our government—from checks and balances that can be sabotaged by extreme partisanship, to norms and traditions that need to be codified into law—and underscored how dangerously polarized America has become in an age when many people receive information through social media and through partisan outlets like Fox and Breitbart.

The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, however, showed that a majority of voters repudiated Trump’s divisive and autocratic vision and reaffirmed the ability of Americans, in the words of the great John Lewis, to use the ballot box as a nonviolent “tool to redeem the soul of America.” From his lifetime as a civil-rights leader, Lewis knew that “democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part” to help build it. In 2020, voters—in unprecedented numbers—did exactly that, led in crucial battleground states by African Americans, by women, by young people and by people who understood exactly what was at stake. This was a sign that de Tocqueville was prescient in pointing to America’s “ability to repair her faults.”

At the same time, the refusal (so far) of Trump and his GOP enablers to recognize the results of the election are reminders that we can never let down our guard, never take anything for granted. As Lewis’ mentor and colleague the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed: “human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work” of people determined to “make real the promise of democracy.”

Tom Nichols is professor at the U.S. Naval War College and author of The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters.

We’ve learned a great deal about ourselves and our fellow citizens over the past four years, and much of it is unpleasant. But even more important, we’ve learned that our system of government is almost entirely dependent on shared cultural norms and traditions about democracy and accountability. If we are not willing to hold our elected officials—and each other—responsible for guarding those traditions, then the law and even the Constitution itself might not be enough to sustain our democratic republic.

In the past, we assumed that the existence of laws or constitutional requirements was sufficient to protect our rights and our institutions. We fell back on these codified and written statutes as insurance against our own behavior and insulation from our political choices. But when we empowered a chief executive and a political party to be “disruptive,” we learned that disruption can spread from the policy world and the conduct of our leaders into the groundwater beneath our entire system of government and poison its various wells. The “law” does not guarantee that we are protected by the rule of law; our commitment to rule of law as a basic value is what protects us and our rights. The Constitution does not automatically enforce itself. Institutions, such as a free press and open elections, do not renew themselves like some kind of perennial garden; they require our actual care and attention.

I hope that one lesson that we take away from the past four years is that we remember that merely writing things down on paper does not create a liberal democracy. We have to care about whether the laws are faithfully executed, whether impartial justice is served, whether the oaths our leaders take were spoken with sincerity. We have to care, deeply, about all of these things and more. Otherwise, all is lost, no matter who wins the next election, or the next one after that.

Lilliana Mason is associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.

This nation has never fully dealt with our legacy of racial violence and oppression, and a large portion of the electorate has no interest in doing so. The deepest divide between Democrats and Republicans today is over whether systemic racism and sexism exist. As Democrats increasingly lean into the need to address racial and gender-based inequality, Republicans deny that it needs to be addressed, and some violently oppose any efforts to promote equality. We are in a fight over the persistence of the traditional social hierarchy, and whether we can or should become a truly egalitarian democracy that represents all Americans equally.

John Austin directs the Michigan Economic Center and is a nonresident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

It’s become clear over the past four years that, unless we address the root economic causes of many American voters’ anger and social alienation, we will remain a divided nation, with many remaining susceptible to the message of demagogues like Donald Trump. In much of left-behind rural America, and still struggling communities that dot the industrial Midwest around my home, anxieties about the economic future interact with a perceived loss of identity, status and control in a changing society. These dynamics generate a toxic brew of resentments of “others,” whether coastal elites or immigrants, and cravings for a return to a simpler and ordered time.

From afar, it appears that Joe Biden rebuilt the “Blue Wall” of Midwest industrial states this year and won over the white, working-class voters that powered Trump to the presidency in 2016. But Biden’s narrow victory in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania was made possible only by an historically high anti-Trump voter turnout, particularly among African Americans in cities. Working-class -whites from still struggling manufacturing towns and farm country doubled down on Trumpism, more excited than ever over Trump’s mix of economic nostalgia, nationalism and nativism.

Where residents of “old economy” communities in Michigan and elsewhere succeed in finding new economic purchase, their attitudes are different, as are outcomes at the ballot box. We’ve seen this in the Midwest swing states, where voters in newly revitalized former industrial communities—like Pittsburgh and Grand Rapids, Michigan—are exhibiting optimistic, forward-looking attitudes, and turning blue. I saw powerful trends away from nationalism and nostalgia in rebounding Rust Belt communities that supported moderate centrists both in the 2018 midterm elections and in this year’s results. The Biden administration and Congress must rebuild and spread the emerging new economy to more people and places in the American heartland. Only then will we heal our politics.

Sohrab Ahmari is op-ed editor of the New York Post and author of the forthcoming The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.

For conservatives, the most acute lesson of the past four years was that corporate America—the owners of capital and the highly educated technocrats who serve them—isn’t on our side. More than that, corporate elites are actively aligned with the cultural and political left: an epochal realignment.

The shift was already apparent, in a latent way, during the Obama administration, but it became nakedly undeniable under President Donald Trump: from brands’ thorough adoption of the latest sex-and-gender dogmas; to sports leagues going woke (even as they looked the other way at their Chinese business partners’ hideous oppression of Muslims); to the way Silicon Valley dweebs living in some of America’s toniest neighborhoods turned against law enforcement. This is all very exciting for us on the right: How much more noble and worthwhile to stand with the working classes than to hanker for marginal tax cuts and trade deals!

Jonathan M. Metzl is professor of sociology; medicine, health and society; and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University and author of Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland.

The Trump era has taught this country about the always fragile and always tenuous nature of racial progress. It taught us that narratives of white racial resentment, and of white aggression masked as victimhood, persist and are too easily manipulated. It taught us that our inability to fully address the traumatic narratives of the past (wages of whiteness, the “color line”) or craft more equitable societies in the aftermath of crisis (e.g., Reconstruction) leave psychological fissures and structural inequities that open at times most urgent and least opportune. Trump’s America exposed our differences, and manipulated them. It taught us that, just as racism is structural, so too is white anxiety a structural feature of our racialized politics. As a result, if it is not continually guarded and protected, democracy can morph into fascism in the blink of an eye.

Ultimately, though, Trump’s America gives us a way forward. It taught us the vital importance of culling the collective power of our diversity in support of the greater good. Building networks and structures based on the common good in turn moves us closer to what economist Amartya Sen calls a “better society” that can emerge from moments of crisis—like an election held during a pandemic and a national reckoning with racism—that spark a renewed drive toward building shared and mutually beneficial communal infrastructures. National health care systems, reformed police, more vibrant food distribution networks, protected climates and closed wealth gaps. As Sen explains it, societies that react to moments of crisis by democratizing access to resources and seating the greatest number or shareholders around the decision-making table come out ahead in the long run. Those that fail to do so are not great again for a very long time.

Tom Frieden is president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, an initiative of Vital Strategies, and former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The country as a whole needs to do a much better job addressing the fundamental concerns that middle-class people have about the loss of jobs and of a sense of place and meaning in their lives. A symptom of not addressing these challenges is growth in support for ideologies that demonize other people and also increased “deaths of despair”—including the increase in suicide and the epidemic of drug overdose. Addressing these concerns will determine the future health and future prosperity in our country. If the United States doesn’t act to support all in society to have fair opportunities—to vote, to work, to get health care—we will continue to be a divided, unhealthy country.

Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

Idon’t think this country has learned one bit from four years of Trump. The left will, as usual, bite off more than they should and allow the right to win again. The right, as always, will underestimate the anger that they stoke with their retrograde agenda and lose. This game has been going on since the days of the Federalists, and it will continue even as the country diversifies—and if you don’t believe me, talk to the Mexican Americans down in South Texas!

Michael Hendrix is director of state and local policy at the Manhattan Institute.

Even as America grew more polarized by geography and density over the past four years, culminating in the 2020 election with one of the greatest urban-rural partisan divides in our history, this country’s metropolitan areas have consolidated power to become the deciding factor in nearly every matter of national consequence. And no wonder: America’s 50 largest metros alone account for half the country’s population, more than half its votes and two-thirds of its economy. Even as population growth slowed in some core cities over the past four years, their surrounding suburbs still boomed, in many cases becoming large cities in their own right. And rather than fleeing to the countryside during the Covid-19 pandemic, people leaving big metros have mostly moved to other big metros, such as Atlanta, Austin, Nashville and Tampa.

The result? Today’s most pressing issues, from the pandemic to civil unrest and economic distress, are all playing out in our cities and suburbs. The Trump era saw mayors become national figures for tackling these local issues. Because urban areas account for a disproportionate share of the nation’s economy and population, their recovery fuels the rest of the country. We must identify barriers to and opportunities for growth—from addressing fiscal woes and onerous housing rules to restoring good quality of life and schooling—not only for the sake of urban dwellers, but for all Americans. As goes America’s metros, so goes our country.

Michael J. Glennon is professor of international law at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

For a lawyer, the stunning discovery has probably been the extent to which our “rock-solid” government has always rested not on laws or judicial opinions or even the Constitution but on unwritten social norms—and how quickly those social norms can be hacked away. John Adams was wrong: It’s not at all a “government of laws not men.” From the start, it’s been a government of people—people who imagined this grand, majestic juridical edifice we call law. Those imagined norms were built up over many decades, and it’s unlikely they can be resparked swiftly, which is why freedom is hard to get and easy to lose.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a senior adviser at Akin Gump, represented South Florida in Congress for three decades.

These past four years have taught me that, when talking about politics, we must find a way forward that treats others with respect, even when we disagree strongly with them. What has happened to the cliché we would use when the differences in our opinions seemed insurmountable: “Let’s agree to disagree”? Now we think we must fight to the death, to cling stubbornly to our positions and cede no ground. On all sides of the political spectrum, we stick to our own views because to do otherwise would seem weak. It is not enough that I win. I must insist that you lose.

We have forgotten that we are all Americans. We all fundamentally want the same things: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If we can have something in common with our Founding Fathers of 244 years ago, surely we have common ground now. Let’s look for it and stop assuming the worst of our neighbors because of their campaign yard signs. Let’s make a concerted effort to debate and disagree with others but to not berate them, belittle them or call them names. Enough. Basta ya.