All that said, I think we are staring down the barrel of Trump's second term. It won't be pretty.
Are our institutions strong enough to withstand his worst impulses, as before? Will another black swan event reveal him (again) for the incompetent he is?
Will America learn anything or will we decend into decades or more of totalitarian rule?
I understand the appeal of Trump, in the abstract. The impulse to kick it all over.
Modi, Orbán, Erdoğan, Putin, Xi Netanyahu, Trump. Where does it end? These people have *popular* support. Sorry, leftists, but your worldwide revolution has arrived, and it does not bode well. It makes no difference that it didn't go according to the leftist project, whatever that might be. Liberal democracy + capitalism resulted in inequality and unrest. This isn't the unrest we liberals and leftists had in mind, but we made our beds, pursuing environmental policies that slapped aside the concerns of rural people. Conservatives seized the opportunity to gin up resentment against "liberals," and here we are. Darkness gathers and we have little choice but to lie in the beds we prepared.
I have 20 years to go at the outside, and I can’t say I'm looking forward to this aspect of it.
As a retired person living modestly on Social Security + savings, I would be a fool to want to risk major distribution. Yet many similarly situated Americans support Trump. Go figure.
We live in interesting times.