Donald Trump returns to the White House in nineteen days.
I feel I ought to express an opinion. My corner of the online universe is tiny, infinitesimal, but I am still an expat in Europe, number myself among those Americans who left their native land largely out of disaffection with U.S. politics. And I have written occasionally of U.S. political issues here in the past.
I don’t have a lot to add to views expressed in past posts. My Spanish tutor helped me translate I explain Trump to Spain in 2016; the 2018 first installment of USA in the Rear View is online in English only. I could quibble about a few points, but only a few.
“Degenerate oligarchy” has been my long-standing, two word diagnosis of ills in American leadership.
In the United States, America’s oligarchic elite has traditionally come from its network of Ivy League and other top-ranked universities. This is horribly unfair, of course, but what seems most relevant to me now is that this de facto system isn’t working well.
If I were a serious student of America’s problems, I would be less interested in the milieu that begot symptom-of-problem Donald Trump than in whatever culture spawned the core-of-problem Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, G.W. Bush and the neocons. Blaming the populist Trump for his own success is like a fifth-a-day alcoholic who blames cirrhosis on an uncooperative liver. The Republican rank-and-file wouldn’t have abandoned oligarchy candidates for the populist if G.W. Bush hadn’t launched the Iraq War.
Oligarchy is always inefficient, and the sooner the collapse, the better. Easy for me to say. I would like to see California devolve or leave the union. Viva Pacifica! We already have air superiority, and a royal family.