It is not easy to find a coherent, positive message in the chaos Donald Trump is sowing, but let me try….

There is a perspective, a frame of reference, almost wholly missing from the debate about US President Donald Trump and politics more broadly. It can be expressed in two questions: Is the political status quo failing to meet the challenges facing us? And has Trump shattered the political status quo? The answer to both questions is surely “yes”. To accept this view opens up new possibilities in US and global politics.

I wrote in Pearls and Irritations last November that we needed to look beyond conventional politics and policy to understand Trump and his impacts. This article develops that argument. It is based on a longer essay published recently in Common Dreams, a prominent American far-left/alternative publication.

Almost everyone I know loathes Trump, seeing him as a threat to the US and the world. I see him as an intensification — perhaps inevitable, perhaps necessary — of a decline in American society that deserves much greater attention. This decline represents the “deep politics” behind Trump’s success. And it is this politics I want to discuss: not the man, or his policies, but the deeper story behind his emergence and domination of US politics.

I want to transcend the ferocious debate about Trump. I am not denying the dangers and risks his presidency creates – and which are already clearly apparent. But I want to examine something else: the chance he provides to re-assess the capacity of the US political system to respond effectively to the foundational challenges it confronts.

Destroying the status quo does not mean Trump himself will provide the answers America needs. More likely, his contribution will be to create the opportunity for others to do this. But Trump has done what needed doing.  At least, that is my hope.

In contrast, the Democrats offered more of the same, and in Joe Biden an ailing, old man. What’s worse they tried to deceive the voters by hiding his cognitive decline, and then replaced him too late with the vice-president, Kamala Harris, who was tied to Biden’s policies. If Harris had won the election, America would have maintained the status quo, its business-as-usual politics.

No wonder there are reports........

© Pearls and Irritations