Re: Trump — There’s Nothing New Under the Sun

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you…
—you’ll be a Man, my son!  “IF,” by Rudyard Kipling
Scripture has announced for millennia that there is nothing new. What is happening now has happened before. 
The Herald has carried Spout Off as a feature for 26 years, but never have we seen it dominated, week after week, by one single topic, as we see right now. When we edit them for you, we have strived over the years to avoid boring you with too much on a solitary topic; so we run a representative sampling of the opinions being expressed and eliminate similarities. However, since the election of Donald Trump, related topics have dominated submissions.
What about this current tumult? Is the sky falling? Is the nation crumbling? Chris DeMuth of the Hudson Institute writes that other presidents have employed similar approaches to Trump’s, which engendered impassioned arguments about strategy and tactics. He states that greatly successful presidents, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, have made similar creative use of conflict to bring forth the best thinking.
Further, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal Feb. 11, that the “least successful modern presidents were the insular Jimmy Carter, who disdained disagreement, and the rigid ideologue Barack Obama, who, in George Will’s formulation, ‘never learned anything from anyone with whom he disagreed.’ In contrast, Bill Clinton enjoyed mixing it up with conservatives, who were often impressed that the president knew their arguments as thoroughly as they did.”
Regarding Trump’s style, DeMuth called it unorthodox but not entirely unprecedented. “He has filled his cabinet with people of proven talent.”  Trump “uses his talent for drama to keep allies focused and opponents distracted.” “Mr. Trump’s zest for debate and willingness to defer to subordinates…makes him more transparent than his predecessors.”
The historian, John S. Gordon, sees something else afoot in the Trump presidency, potentially an entirely new order, like that of Andrew Jackson in 1828. Jackson, born dirt poor, created the modern Democratic Party and “moved the locus of power sharply down the socioeconomic scale. Soon most states repealed property requirements for voting, a first step toward universal suffrage.” To that point, the presidency had been held only by aristocrats from Virginia or Massachusetts.
Jumping to our current times, Gordon notes that the Democrats gained political dominance thanks to the Great Depression, and held that power for most of the next half-century. “But by the 1970s, the liberalism that had powered the New Deal and the Great Society had succumbed to one of the basic rules of political science: Movements tend to evolve toward the extreme. The struggle for civil rights had been decisively won in the 1960s, but liberals kept fighting that war, deepening racial divides with identity politics. Though union membership had been sliding for years, out-of-date laws kept labor politically powerful. The federal bureaucracy metastasized, as program after program was added with little overall planning…
“Liberal policies were increasingly tailored to the interests of a political elite, not the country as a whole. The people noticed…Barack Obama took office with strong Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.  He pushed through a very liberal and very unpopular agenda. The Obama years have proven a disaster for the Democrats. They lost the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014, both tidal-wave elections. Republicans now control most governorships and state legislatures as well…The Obama years showed liberalism to be exhausted, its ideas out-of-date.
“Mr. Trump was elected explicitly to change the self-serving ways of Washington…Mr. Trump has a gift for directly communicating with the people and cutting out the oblivious media, long a part of the problem.
“To bring permanent change, Mr. Trump needs policies that succeed on the ground, not merely in theory. Faster growth and rising income are always rewarded at the ballot box.”
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    The Democratic Party, the press, academia, big labor, and Hollywood are carrying on just as one would predict, after their monumental defeat — Like a wild animal trapped in a corner. Let’s keep our heads, and stand back from the tumult and let the dust settle. — Listen but not respond for now. We think more clearly when we are calm.
Art Hall
From the Bible — What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9