It's Not About Politics But About Culture - Donald Trump's America Will Never Be The Same

Donald Trump is an oversized, outrageous, untamed braggart; an unbridled, outspoken showman; a Borscht belt tummler, an imposer, an intimidator, and a real American. America is not a sophisticated place, so Trump is the first real American President the country has ever had..  

There is no Charlemagne in our past, the savior of Christianity, the heroic defender of France, defeating the invading Muslim Saracens in the Pyrenees.  There is no Louis XIV, the Sun King, architect of Versailles; no Henry VIII who challenged the Pope and changed Britain's religious history.  We have had no shahs, emperors, or shoguns. 

 

America is a middle-brow place which may have been founded on high intellectual Enlightenment principles but on its way West became the rough and ready, shoot-'em-up, rowdy, corralling, herding, range and prairie land that still is.  'The business of America is business', said Engine Charlie Wilson, CEO of General Motors, but he well could have said that the culture of America is business; or in other words, making money. There is no Baroque adornment here, only log cabins and split-levels with a few Italianate Texas mansions to show how money should be spent. 

It is no surprise that Donald Trump is the first real American President.  His tinsel, glitter, yachts, island resorts and blonde, blue-eyed, gorgeous arm candy may not be what we have but what we want.  He has no patience for Jack Kennedy's Robert Frost and Pablo Casals and their high-toned poetry and music, nor do we.  We want streaming, clubs, Altamont and the Eras Tour. We want clamor, revelry, three car garages, and glamour.  There is nothing carefully considered, temperate, or modest about middle class America, never has been, and never will be. 

 

Donald Trump rode into the White House on two occasions because he was not just a populist, but a cultural icon. His supporters have never whined over social injustice, cried over the spotted owl, lamented the fate of the closeted gay man, or protested with Black Lives Matter.  These issues were digressions, disruptions in the pursuit of opportunity, gain, status, and wealth.  The raucous Trump campaign rallies were simplistic, circus affairs; but no different from the Eras Tour or booty-shaking at the Super Bowl.  They were expressive, characteristic, defining events of American culture. 

While the Left smirks at Middle American faith, rodeos, and bass boats, Iowans and Oklahomans turn on Country and Western, cry at the leaving and lost love parts, get up in the morning and punch the clock.  A nation of suburbs and suburban complacency once the scramble to get there is over.  Soccer games, volunteering, and backyard barbecues.  It is the way it always has been, a modicum of good fortune,  hard work, and a sensible and practical approach to well-being. 

So it is no surprise that Donald Trump was re-elected.  After four years of a harping, hectoring, righteous banging about doing the right thing - and God knows there were so many bad things to set right - Americans were ready to return to their roots. To shed the guilt trips - the obligatory nod to the black man, hats doffed to all women, a warm, welcoming embrace to the gender-queer, a walk in the forest, a gulag-enforced obedience to 'value' and arrogated assumptions of right. 

The wrecking ball of the incoming administration which has vowed to dismantle the federal bureaucracy and reduce it to rubble is the centerpiece of the cultural revolution to come.  The removal of the ponderous, interventionist, badgering government agencies which are self-perpetuating organs of control and inhibition is not only a significant management operation but a socially existential one.  The way America is and the way Americans are - wooly, untamed, and ambitious - is just fine. America was built by Robber Barons, sod busters, and saloon keepers and the next wave of prosperity will be back to them.  

 

On Day One of the Trump Administration, the White House will be the palace of the people, beautiful women will come and go, glitzy all-night parties will be held on the South Lawn.  It will be a Gatsby-esque extravaganza of wealth and excess. It will shout success.  It will not look like the Left's America, a dowdy place of shabby misery and entitlement but a happy one, a celebration of billionaires without a welfare mother in sight.  The party will be wealthy and delighted. 

Behind the image will be the complete restructuring of America.  For all to have the benefits of laissez-faire enterprise and for future South Lawn parties to include a wider swath of the society, the chains and harnesses on capitalist endeavor must be removed, information flow must be free, speech unmonitored, and patriotic equality must replace identity politics and affirmative action. 

The entire country does not need reform - just that part which has endorsed inhibited equality, reapportionment rather than opportunity, communalism instead of individualism, and collective worth over personal worth.  It is that culture which must be challenged, defied, and altered.  The Left laughs at Trump's tag line, Make America Great Again, but his supporters know exactly what it means - returning the country to its originalist roots to make it once again a fearless, uninhibited, patriotic, and optimistic place.  The culture of misery, victimhood, fear, doom, and disaster must go, for it is only a self-flagellating, howling, breast-beating hysterical fiction. 

There have been many theories of international development - why Asian countries in a short space of time have developed from rural, agrarian societies to modern economic powerhouses; and why Africa over the same period has not only not progressed but regressed.  A number of observers have suggested that culture is the crux of the problem.  There can be no doubt that the traditional Confucian values of Japan, Korea, and China have been enabling factors in their rise to prominence; and in a similar vein the tribal, animist, aboriginal, forest cultural roots of Africa have held that continent back.

Of course there are many mitigating socio-political and historical factors in Africa's continuing underdevelopment, but the pervasive, persistent influence of culture cannot be overlooked.  And so it is in America.  The Left's culture of victimhood, historical revisionism, communitarianism, neo-socialism and faux Utopian idealism have corroded the originalist ethos of America; and Donald Trump has vowed to uproot it, discard it, and restore the vision of the architects of American democracy.