By Aunt America
I was excited to take on the question of whether or not Trump was really saving America, or just managing its decline. I started working on this piece armed with all kinds of stats and numbers and forecasts… and then trashed it all. Because where we are now doesn’t really matter.
The question of whether the United States continues to decline post-Trump is what we need to ask ourselves. Are conservatives taking advantage of Trumpism, seizing on his audacity and everything that comes with it? The answer to that lies in whether the decline continues, is managed, or even reverses.
First, let’s define “decline.” “The decline of America” includes all that we are, all that we were, all that we could be, and most importantly, if we’re even trying to be all that we could be.
If you’re wondering what I mean, if you can remember the 70’s, I mean… the 1970’s. Awful colors, stagflation, gas lines, horrifying fashion, Vietnam, more children born to unwed mothers, a spiked Moon program, urban blight, ugly buildings, and rising divorce rates. Disco! Decline, decline, decline. People who lived through the 70s tend not to look upon it as a time of great renaissance. It was not a hopeful culture. There was Star Wars. There was Secretariat. We had a movie and a horse. That’s it.
The 1970’s was a tear-it-down culture. The oft-celebrated advancements of the 70’s, such as women’s liberation, came at the cost of the destruction of the nuclear family. There were few clean wins. When I looked for some, even in leftist sources, the suggestions I found included… the establishment of Earth Day.
The question of Trump and decline, then, centers on a sense of building or destroying.
In my last piece, “You Can Just Do Things,” I wrote: “I have lost count of the number of times I have seen Rubio or Trump lean back from a microphone and think, ‘I have never seen a President or a Secretary of State say or do that in my entire life,” and then realize that I never thought to even hope for such a thing, because I simply thought it wasn’t possible.’ I was referring to foreign policy, but I meant it in the sense of everything a government and a nation feel they can or cannot do.
Economic and cultural rebound is indeed fostered by government action– or inaction– from the bottom to the top. Mostly from the bottom; the opinions and policies of your local sanitation board are going to affect your life a great deal more than the current amount of algae in the Reflecting Pool.
And that’s the point.
Economic, social, and cultural growth are intertwined. The starting point of this positive agitation is difficult to pinpoint; it is a moment largely recognized in hindsight. It’s not truly measurable, except perhaps by public opinion polls, and President Hillary Clinton can tell you all about the pinpoint accuracy of those.
A culture in growth or rebirth doesn’t experience it due to the establishment of a Congressional blue ribbon commission recommending the reversal of the American decline. It happens organically. It is Tarps Off.
Tarps Off is a baseball phenomenon started in St. Louis by a visiting high school team that applied one of their own traditions to the Cardinals. To rally the home team, they stood up, took their shirts off, twirled them over their heads, and yelled.
The practice went viral, and all over the nation, young men began gathering at far parts of stadiums, packing up, and twirling. Shots of them on scoreboards often generated greater applause than the actual ballplayers. Ten years ago, these dudes either 1) wouldn’t have dared to do it in the first place, or 2) would have been cancelled into oblivion for sexual harassment, exclusionary behavior, and toxic masculinity.
There’s a glorious self-starting aspect to this. If the St. Louis Cardinals decided to host Tarps Off Night and offered 10% off tickets to young men willing and eager to do this, then herded them in with a couple of mascots and a grinning stadium announcer holding a microphone turned up to maximum annoyance, the thing would collapse under its own weight of cringe. That Tarps Off happened naturally and, as a non-corporate outgrowth of enthusiasm, is exactly how it caught fire.
So it is with the decline or fall of nations. Tarps Off. Will it be imitated, ignored, or absorbed and corporatized (and therefore ruined)? Did the election of Trump save us, doom us, or merely buy us time? The answer is not determined by Trump, but by us.
That is why the question of Trump’s legacy is largely decided after he leaves office. If the people continue to elect the likes of John Thune and Mitch McConnell, thoroughly bureaucratic creatures who made the Capitol their assisted living facility, it’s a managed decline.
If the United States adopts Great Britain’s attitude towards “hateful” social media either by law or social pressure, it’s a managed decline.
If the military starts falling short again of its recruitment goals and again manages to drag wars into generational conflicts, it’s a managed decline.
If the border again becomes an imaginary line in the sand, adding all who cross it to public social services without question or penalty, it’s a managed decline.
And if debt continues to expand like the universe, it’s an absolute decline and not even a managed one. And that’s something we won’t know until Trump is well out of office.
He thinks about his legacy. At the start of his term, Trump proclaimed himself thrilled about presiding over a nation hosting a FIFA World Cup. But even he can’t have anticipated what happened when the rest of the world came to Boston, Miami, and Dallas.
The talk on the social channels these days is all World Cup, and rarely about the matches themselves. It’s foreigners discovering America– not by peering into the Grand Canyon, touring the White House, or gazing at the Statue of Liberty. It’s happening in the wide, free parking lots, the fill-your-own-enormous-cup soda fountains in gas stations, the bathrooms at Bucee’s, the sheer audacity of Bass Pro Shop. There wasn’t a flyover or a carefully managed Fan Zone to be seen. We’re winning over the people of the world, and we’re not even trying. We’re just being us, and they’re falling at our Crocs-clad feet.
Yes, the United States had these things under Obama and Biden. They will likely continue to have them after Trump. But the question of whether we keep them– high trust, prosperity enough to provide free breadsticks, 40 gas pumps in a single place– will tell if he’s truly turned this ship around.
