(2017-01-04) What The King Of Hawaii Can Teach Us About Trump

What the King of Hawaii Can Teach Us About Trump

We’ve learned how much the letter of the law omits. But we have not come to terms with what all of these broken norms (Culture) mean, taken as a whole. If we spend the next four or eight years cataloguing each Donald Trump outrage and patiently explaining to ourselves why this one—surely, it has to be—is finally a bridge too far, we’ll only be repeating our mistake.

We ought to understand him as exposing a pre-existing rot. We need to think about why norms fail in general, and how to act when we can’t rely on them

Norms are Habits, not arguments—they’re an integral structure of behaviors, not independent propositions. They’re bound together in complex ways, and few of us are wise enough to predict how the whole structure will move when we displace any one part of it. That used to be a core Conservative insight. But the recklessness of our right—its assurance that you can elevate a Sarah Palin without paving the way for a Donald Trump—shows that “conservatism” is only its slogan.

four broad ways that liberals and progressives can help realize those goals.

First, we need to recognize that the past isn’t the property of conservatives

Second, putting inequality at the center of our agenda isn’t mainly about winning a few more Rust Belt votes. It’s about something much more existential.

Third, nearly all of the gains for Progressive policy over the next four or eight years are going to come on the state and local level

Of course, Federalism and “States Rights” have long been used as excuses for disenfranchisement—so, fourth and finally, the above can only be morally defensible if it’s coupled with the strongest possible efforts to strengthen one of the federal government’s core functions: the protection of voting rights on all levels