{"id":6667,"date":"2016-02-13T11:03:00","date_gmt":"2016-02-13T11:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/02\/13\/trumps-america\/"},"modified":"2016-02-13T11:03:00","modified_gmt":"2016-02-13T11:03:00","slug":"trumps-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/02\/13\/trumps-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump’s America"},"content":{"rendered":"

I thought he would have 'flamed out' by now, but he is still going strong. Might The Donald be on the way to becoming il Duce<\/em> of America? I ascribed Trump's traction to conservative inaction and Obama's overreach.  But cultural factors need to be considered.  And who better than Charles Murray to do the job?  His WSJ piece<\/a> begins like this:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

If you are dismayed by Trumpism, don\u2019t kid yourself that it will fade away if Donald Trump<\/a> fails to win the Republican nomination. Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken, and its appearance was predictable. It is the endgame of a process that has been going on for a half-century: America\u2019s divestment of its historic national identity.<\/span><\/p>\n

For the eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing in his last book, \u201cWho Are We?\u201d (2004), two components of that national identity stand out. One is our Anglo-Protestant heritage, which has inevitably faded in an America that is now home to many cultural and religious traditions. The other is the very idea of America, something unique to us. As the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, \u201cIt has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

What does this ideology\u2014Huntington called it the \u201cAmerican creed\u201d\u2014consist of? Its three core values may be summarized as egalitarianism, liberty and individualism. From these flow other familiar aspects of the national creed that observers have long identified: equality before the law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and association, self-reliance, limited government, free-market economics, decentralized and devolved political authority.<\/span><\/p>\n

As recently as 1960, the creed was our national consensus. Running that year for the Democratic nomination, candidates like John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Hubert Humphrey genuinely embraced the creed, differing from Republicans only in how its elements should be realized.<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, the creed has lost its authority and its substance. What happened?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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I thought he would have 'flamed out' by now, but he is still going strong. Might The Donald be on the way to becoming il Duce of America? I ascribed Trump's traction to conservative inaction and Obama's overreach.  But cultural factors need to be considered.  And who better than Charles Murray to do the job?  … Continue reading “Trump’s America”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[196,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-americana","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6667\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}