The refrain is familiar: America is going to the dogs and no professional politician gives a hoot. This year, however, Donald Trump’s surprising and ongoing dominance of the polls can be taken as proof that disgust with Washington is verging on the terminal.
Are voters ever happy? Not in the United States. Every four years the American public convulses and contorts and transforms into a nation of 300 million little Oswald Spenglers, warning everyone we’re nearing the end of our civilisation. I’m actually starting to enjoy it. It’s comforting to hear the same thing, even news of the worst omens, over and over. It’s like listening to an old song, the chorus bringing forth the warmest childhood memories.
Belief in the decline of one’s country is about as natural as loving it. It’s easy, then, to dismiss voter anger. Something so routine, the argument goes, cannot be anything of substance. This is mistaken. Crying about imaginary wolves doesn’t mean real ones don’t lurk nearby.
I can’t speak for older readers, but this is the worst voter anger in the United States I’ve seen in my lifetime. (That’s nearly thirty-one years, for the record. Not quite sprouting liver spots, but already sounding a bit too jaded around younger people.) The candidacy of Donald Trump has concentrated this anger into what is surely one of the more bizarre electoral episodes in American history. But Trump is not the cause of the febrility gripping my country; he is more of a symptom. He is America’s cold sweat. The deep cause is the sense, held perhaps since the end of the Cold War, that the U.S. is in the middle of a long twilight marked by cultural decadence and decline.
