A friend of mine wrote this and posted on Facebook. (His hobby is history.) [View all]

[Kablooie]

Over the decades American politics tended to evolve through larger megatrends, regardless of party.
After the whole system collapsed in the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt began the evolution of the government doing more things for the average person. Unemployment insurance, Social Security. Even Republicans went along: Eisenhower with the highway system, Nixon with the Clean Air and Water Acts.

But by the late 70s, this Liberal philosophy ran down, partly from LBJ's Vietnam commitment breaking the postwar economy. Conservatives revamped their philosophy of hating Big Government. Essentially their same Coolidge-Hoover approach in a new package, hawked by their master salesman Ronald Reagan. "Less Government is Better." This idea that if you rolled back taxes and regulations, and let businessmen do whatever they want, everyone would be happy. After forty years, now this philosophy seems to have run out of gas.

Donald Trump is the final gasp of this Less Government school. This year we have been hit by a major crisis, the biological equivalent of a war. 150,000 of our friends and neighbors are dead. People who were alive back in February. Millions unemployed and tens of thousands facing default, eviction and maybe starvation. And our morally bankrupt government has no reaction, no plan, no idea what to do. Nobody has lowered even one lousy flag to half staff.

If we get through this next election with the necessary seed change, a new way of looking at governments relationship to its citizens will be in order. Hold on to your hats, folks!