Donald Trump

was not elected

because of who he is.

Trump was elected

because of who we have become.

The debate about whether Donald Trump is right or wrong is the debate about whether we as a people are right or wrong. There were once broad areas in which we had the same perceptions; one in which our eyes and ears were sufficient for deciding what was fact and what was not. That is no more. The disappearance of the American consensus has weakened us. Our inability to regain it will kill us. We have become the museum-quality archetype of political entropy.

The detritus is visible in everything from a shrouded statue of Christopher Columbus to clothing fluttering from concertina wire along the Mexican-American border. The triumphalist knickknack store in Tucson that seeks to connect Trump to local myth shares the same emotional space as the graffiti scrawled across a condemned statue of Robert E Lee.

Public arguments now turn on ancient grievance and ideological fad. Our treatment of civic fact is grounded not in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," but in "Rashomon." There are many origin points to be offered for the ongoing dissolution of American society. The white Southerners of Richmond see the statue's removal as erasure of the culture with which they have no choice but to identify. Those who wanted the statue down looked upon it as a century old finger in the eye by the white men who ran an indefensible political structure that encouraged slavery with a Biblical zeal. It reaches the point that educated small D democrats seek to cancel Thomas Jefferson and Lee's defenders offer risky arguments and states' rights even as their champion, Donald Trump, suppresses those very rights in blue states. 

It is a case of doctors arguing about the cause of their patient's cancer and demanding that the argument settled before they administer chemotherapy. Eventually, they’ll be able to cut the cadaver open and determine the cause. It will be of no service to the dead. Instead of repairing our country, we are waiting for the autopsy.

At the root of this is the embrace of anger. I once appeared as a guest on Fox News and went back-and-forth with Greta Van Susteren about a congressman rather correctly pointing out that racism still existed in his district. I got a call from a lifelong friend, an abiding liberal, who remarked on my appearance. I asked him why he was watching Fox. His answer: “For the adrenalin rush.” We love getting worked up. Anger is our pornography of the moment.

The Anger is now etched across our commercial landscape and engraved in our public monuments. The far-right has its walls and tchotchke shops. The left has its spray paint and tarpaulins. Families fracture. Suburban homes sport battle flags. 

I am asking people to examine their landscapes, their everyday sights, and ask themselves how they have changed and how that change has been driven by the anger that now suffuses the American experiment.