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Bob Davidson
There is a truism: hard times create strong people, strong people create good times, good times create weak people, weak people create hard times.
It certainly applies to American history: there have been three super cohorts in the about 240 years of our country. The Revolution created a group that ran the country through mostly good times for about 40 years – Washington through Jackson. Then we had a period of mediocrity and weakness, which led to the Civil War. The Civil War generation ran the country from Grant through McKinley. The next period of mediocrity (with the possible exception of T.R.) led to the Depression and World War II. The WWII cohort ran the country for the good times from Eisenhower to Bush I. Now we are in another period of mediocre, weak leaders. It would seem that we are probably in for another period of crisis. You can roughly say that the good times and bad times lasted about 40 years each. The periods of weak leaders were characterized by corruption, partisanship, incivility, and things falling apart, like the recent past.
Incidentally, Theodore Roosevelt is probably the closest to Trump President I know of. He was utterly hated by the elite of his day. He led the Main Street faction against the Wall Street faction of the Republicans and the values of decent Americans against the the grotesque racism and corruption of the contemporay Democrats.
Right now, big business, Wall Street, the tech titans, the swamp bureaucracy, and big pharm are thriving. Small business is being strangled by the reaction to the Wuhan Flu and the shutdown. The tech overlords and their political henchmen are making sure that our current Overton Window is shrinking to exclude the opinions and beliefs of about half or more of the country – traditional American values and morals are pretty much outside the Pale. These actions are almost certain to cause conflict between a shut-out "Main Street" and the increasingly smug and nasty elites.
Personally, I saw Biden vs. Trump as Wall Street vs. Main Street or, to be more personal, the garbage elite vs. people like me. Conversely, the Dems seemed to see it as normalcy vs. the Bad Orange Man who does everything bad and is crazy and evil and stupid and ugly and a poo-poo head and a Russian stooge and a racist, Islamophobe, and xenophobe, not to mention a sinner and a meanie and writes mean tweets to the totally wonderful, admirable people who try to destroy him with slander.
Of course, the country could just gradually fall into deepening decay, like Britain between the War and Thatcher. Or maybe, just become a socialist paradise like Venezuela or Cuba, but with a worse climate. I don’t think that’s very likely since there are always wannabe Hitlers, Tojos and Visigoths outside the gates waiting for us to decay into impotence. I think the question is whether we’ve reached the end of our run or are at the start of a new, different one, like Rome with Augustus.
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