In addition to the financial devastation four out of five Americans has experienced in the past forty years, they've also seen that their governments (federal and state) have only exacerbated the pain they've experienced. Right-to-work laws have decimated* unions (even in the birthplace of the UAW) and earned income is taxed at twice the rate (or more) of unearned income, the "cap" still exists on social security tax meaning that everyone making less than $130,000 per year pays a higher percentage of their income in Social Security taxes than do those making more than $130,000 per year. This is obviously unfair and adds to, rather than reduces the unfair wealth distribution inherent in our economic system. Absurdly, this has caused our politicians to view a household with an annual income of $250,000 as "middle class" (See Bernie's (!) and Hillary's discussions of the middle class during the 2016 campaign).

I believe this situation has caused a large percentage of that 60% that comprise our middle class to view both the economic system and the federal government as the economic system and government for the top 20% (in fairness, perhaps accurately). They do not care if it falls down because they do not feel properly represented by either. They actually delight in the fact that so many of us are horrified at what this president and his sychophantic cult (aka Republicans) are doing to the institutions the top fifth were raised to believe in and which have benefited them. They don't want things "to return to normal" because "normal" didn't benefit them. At least in the past forty years it hasn’t.

“Things are going fine” is clearly unsustainable, which is unfortunately not a stance that the Democrats could plausibly have assumed three years ago: HRC kinda had to take the position that Obama had done more than simply stanch the bleeding. People were tired of hearing “America’s best days are yet to come,” when in their experience, depending on their ages, America’s best days were either manifestly behind it or, if yet ahead, had a long way to go before these even reached “tolerable.” And the pee-pul, or at least enough of them in the Rust Belt to tilt three states into madness, voted or abstained accordingly.

You’ve asserted times past that Clinton could not have won three years ago, which is manifestly untrue, and that Sanders would have prevailed in a walk, which is to say the least a dubious proposition, but let’s not take up old skirmishes. We are agreed, at least, that the collateral damage incurred over the past thirty-four months of heightened contradictions has been direr than many of us feared (over on the Book of Face, our old pal Lunsford is sunnily predicting Trump’s imminent downfall, with a broad, sunlit uplands to follow: “Once Hitler was defeated, the fever that had taken Germany immediately disappeared, and sanity returned overnight. Yes it looks bad, but moral depravity is self-limiting.” I noted that fever abatement in that instance required a pretty rigorous course of treatment administered by Doctors Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt).

Unlike Ross, I don’t see us coming out of this even if Trump shoots himself in his bunker a year from now. Germany was no bed of fucking roses in the first years after its defeat. Even with a President Sanders or Warren, even with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, we are still stuck with tens of millions of feral voters—I speak here not merely of the “economically anxious” but also of that substantial subset of these for whom Trump is the adored embodiment, bloated up to superhuman scale, of their own grotesque moral deformities—and a political party that has sped past flirtation with fascism and headlong into carnal embrace. These elements are not going away in our lifetimes. And of course, if Ginsberg should peg out and Thomas retire over the next year, you can be certain that McConnell will slot in a couple of thirtysomething Federalist Society hacks onto SCOTUS as a roadblock to any progressive policies that might be advanced over the course of the next several decades.

Whatever awaits us on the other side of Trump will be a society—and, in all likelihood, a world order—no one would have dreamed of a decade ago.

cordially,

*If only unions had been merely decimated, the toiling classes would be in markedly better shape today. Please note the the actual meaning of “decimate” is baked into the goddamn word.