Precipice is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Thanks for upgrading to a paid subscription. Writing is my job. Your support of that means everything to me.
It appears that I’m living through another tectonic shift. This is the second. There are a few differences this time. I was thirteen for the first one, and it shaped a lot about my worldview, much of which I later was fortunately able to unwind. Also, that one brought to the fore the two main sociocultural forces that had been shaping up for some time. The Yippies may have rioted outside the DNC convention in Chicago, and the students at Columbia may have shut down classes and administration, but Nixon won the election, and Merle Haggard released “Okie From Muskogee” and “Fightin’ Side of Me.”
The two forces have been in contention ever since, even as each of them has morphed into something less grounded in any kind of heritage. Which is what brings us to the current tectonic shift.
Conservatism has been replaced by Trumpism, which is a markedly different critter. Some recent evidence: a movement that has room for RFK, Jr. Tulsi Gabbard but not for Liz Cheney is something irreversibly untethered from Burke, Bastiat, Reagan and Scruton.
And to state the obvious, Trumpsim has, in the past three weeks, ensured that its stamp upon the political landscape is pervasive and long-lasting. Europe is concluding - correctly - that it needs to unify and see to its own security. There’s a sense of urgency to their so concluding. Post-America’s immediate neighbors to the north and south are proceeding on the basis that things have gotten off on the wrong foot with the new administration in Washington.
Domestically, the cultural zeitgeist has abruptly shifted - or, rather, forces until recently assumed to have been dominant have been show to be the niche position of a minority.
Democrats are at odds over how to respond to a second Trump presidency. The so-called Resistance that propelled Democrats during his first term seems weary, if not depleted. In Congress, party leaders are settling into a strategy that focuses more on Trump’s expected failures to fulfill the promises he made to voters, and less on his norm-breaking provocations.
Which means that there’s no meaningful push-back to a president who says this:
There won’t be any snapback to anything those of us old enough to remember the twentieth century or even the first decade or so of this one would consider normal.
I don’t like it. I suspect fewer and fewer post-Americans will as it all keeps getting weirder.
But it’s what the folks voted for, and here we are.
But I do take comfort in the fact that the eternal record book shows that I didn’t cast my lot either with the form of national ruin we’re experiencing, or the one we avoided.
