A brief history of the United States, mostly from the end of World War II to the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

1. American mythology up to World War II: Every nation's leaders tell lies about themselves, and to flatter their people, lies about the country. What is exceptional about America is the extent to which those lies were accepted, and concreted into a mythology that hardly anyone doubted. This can go back all the way to Winthrop's "city on a hill," and should include slogans like "empire of liberty" and "manifest destiny," the opening and closing of the frontier, and maybe even "the business of America is business."
2. American mythology in the crucible of World War II: WWII changed American self-conception in several ways: we defeated the world, and we saved the world, and we attributed that to our own virtues (or some might say, to God), which produced a toxic victory culture. This appeared in both liberal and conservative forms, although for the time being the liberal variant was dominant.
3. The shock of the 1946 election, and the pattern of breaking bad by pursuing nostalgia. This was the first of several times when people felt flush enough to want to "live like Republicans," so made the mistake of voting them into office. Taft-Hartley was the most obvious consequence, eventualy destroying the countervailing power of unions, which allowed productivity gains to be decoupled from wages, accelerating inequality.
4. The Red Scare and the Cold War: Liberalism turns against the working class, initially abroad but effectively at home as well. Conservatives can in turn not only jump to the lead in opposition to the communists, but can smear liberals as well.
5. Reconstruction and its discontents: The delayed breakthrough for civil rights, including the end of race-based immigration restrictions, and the backlash, especially its "subtler" forms, where de facto discrimination could persist (especially as "law and order," "war on drugs," etc.)
6. The Vietnam War, which destroyed the credibility of American liberalism, and with it the New Deal Democratic Party. This may be the spot to note the rise and fade of the New Left.
7. The Carter-Reagan reaction: I tend to group them together, with deregulation, Iran, and especially the Volcker recession shared points. Their motives and goals differed, but both started from the economic belief that the New Deal/big corporate model was defunct. Reagan was more effective because he tapped back into American mythology more shamelessly, and because he had few concerns about who got hurt along the way.
8. Clinton's New Democrats, their belief in trickle-down economics, a cult of personality, and the rise of an even more vicious Republican opposition (Newt Gingrich was only the beginning).
9. Bush-Cheney: another Reagan rebound, even more cynical this time, pursuing a naked agenda of more wealth and power for the rich, more precarity for everyone else, plus a lot of war.
10. Obama-Biden: proving it's too late for a return to normalcy, especially when you can't command a majority in Congress, and feel too beholden to the old order to risk any sort of change.

By 2016, most Americans were disaffected and estranged from a political system where both parties were dominated by big money donors, where the corporate media limited messaging to clichéd talking points, and opposition seemed impossible. The Democratic nomination was locked up by Hillary Clinton, promising more Obama (at best) or more likely just more Clinton, a formula that had lost whatever promise it offered in 1992. Clinton's only selling point was that she wasn't as bad as the Republicans, but Republicans had done so much damage every time they got into power that most Democrats were willing to settle for any alternative, especially one that could compete money-wise.

Enter Bernie Sanders. Clinton beat him back, then lost the election.

Republicans were also very unhappy. They had lost two straight elections to Obama, running mainstream media darlings McCain and Romney, who had money and the inside track, but were suspect to most of a party base which had been radicalized by eight years of relentless Obama-bashing. The crowded field had been picked by their billionaire sponsors, aside from Trump, who claimed to be independent by virtue of being his own billionaire. I suppose I'm going to have to swallow hard and write about his popular appeal here, and more importantly how he tapped into the same revolutionary ferment that Sanders appealed to (more rationally, as he actually offered practical policies, where Trump was all gut instincts). While that boosted him in the early primaries, what was ultimately more important was that the Republican establishment didn't make a serious effort to stop Trump. They realize that he wasn't a serious threat to their power, and could be an asset, especially if he's able to appeal to voters who thought McCain was too hawkish and/or thought Romney was too greedy.

Revolutions occur when the old regime not only fails but is hard and brittle. Leftist revolutions have become rare, because democratic states are flexible even when they are ineffective at problem solving, and because most people on the left dislike violence and distrust power. Sanders' carefully couched talk of "a political revolution" struck many of us as anachronistic. But also, as labor as waned, and minorities have been compartmentalized (do we have to talk about "identity group" politics here?), the Democratic Party has been taken over by professional elites and their allied business interests, so even if they generally support more equality, they are far from desperate enough to take risks with "progressive" reforms.

On the other hand, right-wing revolutions are still permissible, at least to the rich class, who have little honest popular support, but many options to manipulate politics from the shadows. Still, it's so much more satisfying to flout your wealth and power in public, rather than to pretend you're doing the world a favor. The appeal of fascist parties to the old rich has always been that they can deliver populist votes while catering to the needs and desires of the rich. Sure, you can't always control the upstart, as German elites discovered with Hitler, but Trump is too much of a patsy to be a serious threat. And perhaps more importantly, he's one of them, with the same desires and lack of scruples. His is the kind of revolution they can get behind. And for Trump's first term, it paid off handsomely. I mean, aside from the fact that his administration was a disaster, and easily voted out of office, in favor of the Democrats' weakest possible candidate.

But then things got weird. Trump retained enough hardcore popular support to scare or chase off any and all challengers in the Republican primaries. (Not that the other candidates had much to offer.) Why he should remain so popular is an interesting question, which mostly has to do with the lack of credibility the mainstream press had, the inability of Democrats to articulate an alternative (or even to expose his obvious faults), and the primacy of raw emotion in making political decisions (possibly because more rational choices, like voting for Obama or Romney or Kerry, so rarely pan out).

But where Trump's supposed independence was a big factor in his 2016 win, in 2024 he had built (or become figurehead of) a political machine, with major donor money (most flagrantly Elon Musk), and a detailed agenda (Project 2025) for radically restructuring government. Trump sold his agenda with emotive terms like revenge and redemption, but it was always there, and he froze out previous power centers in the Party (like McCain's neocons and Koch's libertarians).

The title comes from the fashion in the 2024 campaign to dismiss Trump and/or Vance as "weird." Granted, most of the people who said that had other complaints, but why focus on the that makes you look like a stuck up scold? (Especially coming from Walz, a former gym coach, a species I've been called that and worse by.) Trump is pretty adept at using his "weirdness" as a shield: quotes out of context come off as goofs or jokes. (I haven't really thought about it, but Vance seems to have a different kind of weirdness, more calculating and less fun.)

Two years into his administration, the rot is obvious to see, and its sources are numerous. I'll have to spend too many pages detailing it, but the details are unprecedented and incredible. How Harris failed to warn us, or to present herself as a credible alternative, is still unfathomable. But that part could slide into the following chapter.

Title is from the Jane Jacobs book, so I'll probably have to review her five signs, and possibly other similar projections. This may beg for some speculation about the 2028 election (still two years off), but we're talking about two possible scenarios: one is where Trump or some proxy or follower continues to rule past 2028, extending and cementing his legacy, at least for all practical purposes. I don't think the odds of this happening are very good, but that discussion can be postponed to the next section. The other (more likely) scenario is that significant parts of Trump's legacy continue to hold sway even if he is followed by an anti-Trump candidate, especially if that person fails and allows a Trumpist return to power (as Biden did).

I don't think we need to do much futurology here. We can start with various specific Trump policies and proposals, show how they are currently working (badly, I'd say), and then extend them in time, generally assuming that no one is able to stop them. This involves looking at current institutions that can resist, and how they can be disabled. (I expect these will be policy specific, so will emerge from the cases.) I doubt we need to go very far into the future to find disastrous outcomes. Indeed, we may have to address how the Trumpists can cling onto power even when most people realize that they're being victimized.

Some things that will obviously have to be mentioned here: war, poverty, primitive rebels (Hobsbawm for gangs and ad hoc criminal groups), climate change, pandemics, war again.

Title from Rush Limbaugh, who totally wasted it, and has no bearing here. First thing to look at here are possible sources of resistance against Trumpism. This again will probably start with specific Trump policies, which provoke protest groups, backed up with public interest organizations, unions, and other nonprofits (including organized religion?). We also need to look at business lobbies, state and local governments, the courts, the civil service, and the military. We need to look at foreign governments, the UN, NGOs, multinational companies, etc. Different things will trigger different forms of resistance from different parties. Terrorism is certainly possible, especially where other options are precluded. (Terrorism will most likely appear in the previous chapter, as an expected consequence of those bad policies.) The goal isn't to map all these out, but to suggest the variety and scale of resistance Trump's acts will run up against.

The most important one of these is the Democratic Party, as that will be the necessary vehicle for unseating Trump.