The US that trump attacks is the US that in fact has been in many ways the enemy of the people who voted for him, or support him now. The country was run for the benefit of the 1% and the professional class and is most associated with the Clinton’s, Obama and less well known, Geithner and Larry Summers.

If we are to recreate the country as a good place to live we must take on this issue, which requires recognizing the legitimacy of Trump support in the concrete details of what was happening to the majority prior to Trump’s announcing his candidacy.  As we know, peple were losing out, incomes down, social mobility less, and – let’s give people some credit – climate change  not being addressed, hence not serious.  Remember, a support in politics always is in the context of the alternatives. The Democratic party has not been presenting itself as – well, as anything. Not a good alternative.

I am reading The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715 by Pail Hazard, It contains the wonderful

“Spain alone had dimmed her radiance. We will not say that even now she did not fling over Europe some rays of a light that could not be extinguished; but it is a hard task for a nation to go on indefinitely keeping ahead of her rivals. It means she must never falter, never exhaust her strength, never cease to keep bright, and to diffuse around her far and wide the radiance of her pristine glory. But by this time Spain had ceased to live in the present. The last thirty years of the seventeenth century, and, for the matter of that, the first thirty of the eighteenth, were with her well-nigh completely barren. Never before, throughout her whole intellectual history, says Ortega y Gasset, had her heart beat so feebly. Wrapt up in herself, she presented an attitude of lofty indifference towards the rest of the world. Travellers continued to visit her, but they did not conceal the disdain with which she inspired them. They harped on her defects—a populace wallowing in superstition, a court sunk in ignorance. They enlarged on the decay of her commerce and spoke contemptuously of the sloth and vainglory of her people. As for her writers, he foreign critics repeatedly gave instances of their pretentious and affected style.. people were begining to say not only that Spain had lost her power and influence, but that she was a traiter to her wn genius  Her romantic spirit, her national pride, her nice sense of honour, her love of justice, her complete unselfishness—all those qualities which had been her particular pride and glory, Cervantes in his Don Quixote had held up to ridicule. And the Spaniards by applauding Don Quixote had belied their nature and disowned their birthright. Absurd as it was, this idea was not more absurd than a host of other reproaches with which nations competing for leadership have sought to give the coup de grâce to their already weakening rivals.”