Welcome, 2017.
Where have you been all our lives?
It’s been a long, hard road these last few years. A lot of work has seemed dry and fruitless. There is probably some whitewater ahead, but for the first time in eight years, it will be possible to face it with hope, and some level of assurance that things won’t drift ever worse-ward without effort and attention being put on them.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
For what it’s worth, I suspect that there will be a sort of “jump” — perhaps a bit jolting — to a new mindset coming out of Washington. We’re in a serious rut right now, in terms of the public dialogue and the public mind. Our whole frame of reference has gone askew; we expect everything to be “about” a certain set of progressive-left narrative touchstones, and so the media and the people talk confusedly in those terms, ignoring or glossing over all the ways in which they don’t make sense, as compared to reality.
It’s not going to be as unsurprising as we may think, to get America back on track. But I think the Trump administration is going to serve the indispensable purpose of breaking the hold of the progressive-left narrative on the public mind. Team Trump isn’t going to talk or make policy in progressive-left terms.
The MSM and many others won’t know what to do about that. They don’t know how to interpret something straightforward like Donald Trump wanting to prioritize favorable trade conditions for America, and allowing investment and commerce and innovation to flourish. These policy priorities won’t be about wringing our hands over victim groups and suing each other into oblivion. But neither will they fit into the old-consensus molds of foreign and domestic-regulatory policy.
There will also be a lot of things, new and old, handed to us as problems by the rest of the world. Trump is an international businessman himself; he has no intention of fortifying a moat around a “Fortress America.” But you also can’t see him doing the “build democracy abroad using everything (up to and including the National Guard and the Reserve) except doctrinal formations of the U.S. Army” thing. And that’s a net positive.
It’s going to be quite the ride. Fasten your seatbelts. Welcome, 2017. We’ve got the light on for you.
A Happy and Blessed New Year to all our friends in LU Nation, from Liberty Unyielding.
