It goes darker still
There are times when being proved right is the worst thing you can imagine… In the run up to the US election I had lots of conversations with my daughter, who studied US politics. She thought Harris would win based on proper rational analysis. I thought Trump would win based on a nasty feeling.
My rationale was this – the US hasn’t gone deep enough into the crap yet for there to be a consensus that Trumpism is a bad thing. Now, don’t get me wrong, it really should have come to that conclusion, but when you see that even the Jan 6th insurrection is not sufficient to stop Trump running again, then you know that not enough people have had that realisation. In the UK we finally, finally got rid of the Tories this year. But it took fourteen years and a lot of crap for the mood to swing sufficiently. Brexit wasn’t enough, there were still people who convinced themselves it would be good if only, you know, we did it properly. It took a Johnson premiership, weekly scandals, partygate and Liz Truss for chrissakes, before the British people finally turned.
The US is typically a nation of extremes, and so I fear it will take more than this before they reach the bottom from which they rebuild. Who knows, maybe there is no bottom here. A large proportion of the American public never really came to terms with the Civil War and agreeing that slavery was a bad thing. Unlike Germany and Japan, who after WW2 rebuilt themselves anew with a firm focus on not becoming that sort of nation again, the lack of reckoning in the US has lingered. Trumpism is its consequence. I fear there is a long way down yet for the US (and the world) before there is a universal acknowledgement of the wrong direction. God help us all.
