When America Stopped Being Great
Nick Bryant
Another effort, this time by a Brit, to try to understand what went wrong with America in 2016 and thereafter. That is, how the Age of Trump happened. As the title indicates, the post-mortem looks for continuity, and addresses the question of how much of Trump’s rise was continuous with trends in the Republican Party and how much was a clean break. Bryant sees a through line, calling Trump’s election a revolution “decades in the making.” His was less a hostile takeover and more “a merger and acquisition, with shareholder support and buy-in from a large portion of the customer base.” This is something that had been “brewing for years,” and only came as a surprise to those who had misunderstood and downplayed “the transformative changes that had been overtaking America – politically, economically, culturally and technologically – for the past 50 years.” The roots, in other words, lay in the Reagan revolution. What’s even more disturbing than the process of how we got here, however, is that the “economic, technological and demographic trend-lines all point to politics becoming more polarised and extreme” moving forward. “I fear more American carnage,” Bryant concludes.
goodreports.net 