Trump is not the cause of our nation's problems, he's a result of them

 Sam Smith - Bad as Trump may be, we were heading his way long before he made it to the White House. In fact, more than few of the roots of Trump can be found in the Reagan years, the time when the long term values of the New Deal began to be destroyed. Even as late as 2008, a new presidential candidate, 

Barack Obama, described it this way:.

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating.. . . He just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

This stunning assessment by someone who would soon be a Democratic president shows how far we had moved from the New Deal even more than four decades ago. As the son of someone who worked in the Roosevelt Administration nearly all of its time and as one who became an activist in the 1960s, I have long been aware of how perceptions and possibilities have changed. As Wikipedia notes, "Historian and journalist Sean Wilentz argues that Reagan dominated this stretch of American history in the same way that Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal legacy dominated the four decades that preceded it." 

We are not only far less inclined to move forward in a progressive manner, we are far more accessible to the crazy right such as Trump.  

Consider, for example, a study by the Economic Policy Institute finds that CEO pay in this country is 399 times as much as a typical worker gets. This pay has skyrocketed 1450% since 1978. 

Even less noted are the changes that have occurred culturally. It is not accidental, for example, for Trump to cite Hollywood stars in defense of accusations of  alleged sexual abuse of a woman. Or for extremist Fox News to have such influence on the Republican right. .

We also have the decline in religion, efforts to distort public education, the banning of books and other changes in our culture that reflect not natural or national consensus but the machination of right wing institutions. Most disturbing, perhaps, is the decline of community as a major moral, political and social value creator and encourager. During decades of covering politics, I have come to realize how much sanity and decency my own neighborhoods contributed to my view of things, first in DC and then in Maine. And, as I follow the news today, I'm struck by how little the media and our "leaders" give to such behavior and values.  

One of the prices of this change has been an increase in the idea that such choices are strictly individual and that one has the right to attempt to enforce your values on others. The 199 mass shootings this year so far is a good example. 

If we are going to have a constitutionally functioning country, we have to start from the bottom. Besides, given the course of things, it may be our primary salvation: to restore at the community level the values and behaviors that we would also like to see at the top. To relearn what it's like to living in a decent United States of America.