Donald Trump is the source of great pain on the left and also in the professional politician class of the GOP.
Why ?
He was an outsider in GOP politics but the GOP politicians had failed a lot of the voters, including me. Like Ross Perot in 1992, he attracted a lot of people who were tired of being taken for granted by the regular politicians.
Now there are some interesting theories of what is happening.
Henry Kissinger, who knows Trump personally, has said some interesting things about him.
The 93-year-old Nobel laureate told CBS show Face The Nation that the Republican’s unconventional style could be an asset and an ‘extraordinary opportunity’ for the US.
‘Donald Trump is a phenomenon that foreign countries haven’t seen. So it is a shocking experience to them that he came into office, at the same time, extraordinary opportunity,’ Kissinger said.
‘And I believe he has the possibility of going down in history as a very considerable president,’ he added.
Naturally, this has disturbed some of the usual Trump opponents.
Now, as Donald Trump signals that he wants a more cooperative relationship with Moscow, the 93-year-old Kissinger is positioning himself as a potential intermediary — meeting with the president-elect in private and flattering him in public. Like Trump, Kissinger has also cast doubt on intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia sought to sway the election in Trump’s favor, telling a recent interviewer: “They were hacking, but the use they allegedly made of this hacking eludes me.”
The headline, of course, smears Kissinger, always hated by the left, as “a longtime Putin confidant.”
What is going on ?
Richard Fernandez, whose writings I read every day, has an interesting thought.
Maybe the next era of public life will be defined by a resurgence of localism.”
Localism is the belief that power should be wielded as much as possible at the neighborhood, city and state levels. … Politicians in Washington are miserable, hurling ideological abstractions at one another, but mayors and governors are fulfilled, producing tangible results … many cities have more coherent identities than the nation as a whole. … People really have faith only in the relationships right around them, the change agents who are right on the ground. ..
People like me are very frustrated by the attempts to run all of American society from Washington DC. Lyndon Johnson ran the Vietnam War that way, picking targets and sending “signals” from DC. That did not work out well.
Fernandez links to David Brooks, the NYT house “conservative” and this time Brooks seems to get it.
We’ve tried liberalism and conservatism and now we’re trying populism. Maybe the next era of public life will be defined by a resurgence of localism.
Localism is also thriving these days because many cities have more coherent identities than the nation as a whole. It is thriving because while national politics takes place through the filter of the media circus, local politics by and large does not. It is thriving because we’re in an era of low social trust. People really have faith only in the relationships right around them, the change agents who are right on the ground.
The column is worth reading in full.