I actually grew up in NYC, and I used to read The New York Post a lot, so I knew about different Donald Trump bullshit and antics maybe before some other people, who grew up in other places, might have. One of the biggest things to me about the rise of Trump is that everyone gets so flustered with his complete bullshit on so many topics, but he keeps doing it and flustering more people. Why? As David Leonhardt of The New York Times explains today, it’s simply because he can.
Now, we do have a pretty divisive cultural time in the U.S., at least on surface. People are screaming about snowflakes and Boomers and debt relief and kids in cages. It’s all very fraught. In reality, the type of polarization we are currently seeing is probably pretty rational, and American political polarization has long been somewhat unique.
Plus: as much as we wring our collective hands about injustice and different social issues, there are two realities to consider. One is that by and large, this is the best time in human history to be alive (although admittedly it doesn’t always feel that way). Two is that there are a lot of people in the world who just want to go to work, watch Netflix, and scroll Instagram and that will become the measure of their life. They don’t really want to wade in the deep end of these things, these bigger things.
