2017 was Trump’s freshman year. Here are ten things we learned in 2017.
10) The Democratic-Republican Party is passé, out of touch and old. We should have learned this long ago, but it became a teaching point this year. Anyone watching US national politics gets a steady drumbeat of decrepit, dementia-ridden crankiness, and that’s with the sound turned off. Any of the younger folks representing the uni-party have an air of a harried caretaker pulling double shifts in a memory-impaired facility. If the internet provided smells with the sound, we’d have the scent of urine and old sheets.
9) The Democratic-Republican Party does not like being called a uni-party. It also is wary of the newly popular and even chic term “deep-state” because it suspects the term refers indelibly to something they deeply admire and fundamentally need.
8) The Democratic-Republican Party hates the young. Perhaps, they resent the young, rather than hate them, with the resentment of beggars and borrowers to their betters and their slaves. Or perhaps it is simply fear. They look into the contaminated maw of the debt and dependency monster they created – and the young increasingly behave as if repudiation of that debt system and abandoning the monster is a rational and necessary course of action.
7) Trump is a winning combination of grand vision and oppositional defiant disorder. In other words, youthful. (See items 8 through 10 above).
6) The progressive core of middle and upper class women between the ages of 30-60 are fantastic bullies. Who knew? In fairness and full disclosure, #metoo.
5) Many people living in the US and around the world don’t respect bullies, and even more don’t like them. As shocking as this may be to contemplate, bullies arouse shared feelings of anger, disgust, and a collective desire to right wrongs.
4) Trump is incessantly called a big bully by the progressive big bullies. Something about this is hugely satisfying for the rest of us. It feels like a safe space.
3) When Trump was a child, they didn’t give participation trophies. However, his mother loved him fiercely and always told him he was a winner. Families raise children, not villages. Incidentally, for well over a decade now, those laughed-at millennials – with their tricked up school loans, on their parent’s health insurance, living in the family basements and over the garages – get it. They innately value their own money, their own ideas, their own creativity, their own liberty, and family over government. Snowflakes they are truly not. They will, however, rain down ice on the generations that stole from them and lied to them.
2) President Trump can be amazingly rude, by modern American Victorian standards. He has disrupted D.C.’s murderous, deceitful and rapacious rule more than any modern predecessor, embarrassed the King’s court, deprived the executive branch of coin and prestige, demanded that federal agendas and activities be rolled back, and he has done so in a way that puts his opposition on defense, every time. Perhaps we really learned simply that Trump can be amazing.
1) We are watching the empire smolder and burn, and many of us are enjoying the spectacle, if not directly benefiting from it. It’s been a good year.
In 2018 we will be wise fools together. I hope the President continues to deliver a good show, and ups his game. In terms of the party politics, the anti-Trump message is catchy and exciting. It brings voters to polls. The drama is real, the political battles as entertaining as ever before.
Closer to home, Virginia is newly blue and progressive, thanks to federal lavishment of money – money taken from the other 49 states and from 100 million unborn taxpayers and then partially redistributed to our 8 most populated counties around the DC beltway and the eastern military regions. As with most progressive states, Virginia has started to lose population, even as state voting participation trends higher.
In one state district, an actual tie occurred in November, and an elected delegate will be selected on December 27th through a random drawing.
It’s a wonderful idea that I hope spreads everywhere. Happy New Year!
