… Media preoccupation does not signify historical consequence, and despite the breathless attention we lavish on him now, it’s wholly possible that future historians may view Trump less as a major force in our nation’s narrative and more as a sidebar whose disruption, nativism and anti-democratic impulses distracted us from the real changes underway in our country, ones driven by the very younger Americans who are in the forefront of rejecting Trump and Trumpism.
We’ve been down this path before, most notably in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan dominated U.S. politics and both journalists and scholars characterized those years as a time of conservative ascendancy. But were they? …
As the scholar Tom Smith of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) observed from General Social Survey data in 1985, on issues of sexual morality, women’s rights, family values and practices, Americans actually had little interest in returning to the 1950s. On key cultural and social issues, according to Smith, “support for liberal positions [has] grown substantially over the last twenty years and now a solid majority of Americans favor liberal positions.” In short, what had begun in the 1960s was a cultural reshaping of American values, institutions, businesses, universities, social relations and families that no single president — no matter how popular — could disrupt. CONTINUED
Leonard Steinhorn (American U.), Washington Post
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