My great fear was that Trump would lose, and would invoke -- directly or by impllication -- a mega-January 6th, resulting in the crushing of the patriot movement. Now we'll see whether the people around him can (1) prevent him from doing anything too stupid, and (2) push him to do a few smart things.
What might those smart things be? We need to reclaim our institutions, starting with the educational system at all levels. This will be difficult but we must try. Then we need to try to reverse the spread of 'wokeness' in the police and military, which should be a bit easier to do. The really tricky area will be foreign policy: President Eisenhower presided over a compromise end to the Korean War, with the Bad Guys keeping half the country. He didn't intervene militarily to help the Hungarian revolutionaries in 1956. Despite this, Communism didn't conquer the world. Trump, and his advisors, need to keep this in mind as they consider what to do about Ukraine.
Those are some good points, though as usual I don't completely agree with them. I don't think there was much of a chance of a "mega-January-6th" - those people's energy was spent, and they saw what had happened the last time around; some things just don't happen twice. (For the same reason, Democrats right now aren't protesting with nearly as much enthusiasm as they did in late 2016 and early 2017 - do you remember those pussy hat marches?)
Like I said in the essay, I'm crossing my fingers that J.D. Vance manages to grab as much power within the new administration as possible, though I'm a lot less enthusiastic about R.F.K. Jr. and even Elon Musk (Musk is brilliant when he's inventing stuff and running his companies, a lot less so when he does stuff like name his child "X Æ A-12 Musk," and I'm worried too much political friction would bring out the latter.) I'm pessimistic about conservatives' ability to "reclaim... the educational system at all levels," stuff like that just doesn't happen in a top-down way, though I'm 100% supportive of anything that decentralizes education and gets parents more involved (and I'm saying this as someone who got his entire K-12 education from a mix of homeschooling and small Christian schools; it's not an abstract issue for me).
As for foreign policy - well, I written about that before in "The Poland Paradox." At this point I'm fine with letting Russia annex the eastern quarter-or-so of Ukraine, since both sides in that war have suffered enough already, and the Donbass was full of separatists to begin with, and Ukraine will hopefully serve as a wakeup call to other small democracies to get their act together before it's too late. Ultimately the real test of maturity in foreign policy is just admitting that the United States is not the principal actor, and getting used to the fact that decisions made in places like Warsaw and Tokyo and Taipei and Jerusalem and New Delhi are just going to matter more for the future of Eurasia than decisions made in Washington. (Note that this is distinct from the "cut-em-loose" philosophy, which agrees with the interventionists that America is the only liberal power with agency, and only disagrees about how that agency should be used.) So for instance my own brand of "moderate isolationism," contra Kissingerism, would not be bothered in the slightest if Taiwan acquired nuclear weapons.
My great fear was that Trump would lose, and would invoke -- directly or by impllication -- a mega-January 6th, resulting in the crushing of the patriot movement. Now we'll see whether the people around him can (1) prevent him from doing anything too stupid, and (2) push him to do a few smart things.
What might those smart things be? We need to reclaim our institutions, starting with the educational system at all levels. This will be difficult but we must try. Then we need to try to reverse the spread of 'wokeness' in the police and military, which should be a bit easier to do. The really tricky area will be foreign policy: President Eisenhower presided over a compromise end to the Korean War, with the Bad Guys keeping half the country. He didn't intervene militarily to help the Hungarian revolutionaries in 1956. Despite this, Communism didn't conquer the world. Trump, and his advisors, need to keep this in mind as they consider what to do about Ukraine.
Doug,
Those are some good points, though as usual I don't completely agree with them. I don't think there was much of a chance of a "mega-January-6th" - those people's energy was spent, and they saw what had happened the last time around; some things just don't happen twice. (For the same reason, Democrats right now aren't protesting with nearly as much enthusiasm as they did in late 2016 and early 2017 - do you remember those pussy hat marches?)
Like I said in the essay, I'm crossing my fingers that J.D. Vance manages to grab as much power within the new administration as possible, though I'm a lot less enthusiastic about R.F.K. Jr. and even Elon Musk (Musk is brilliant when he's inventing stuff and running his companies, a lot less so when he does stuff like name his child "X Æ A-12 Musk," and I'm worried too much political friction would bring out the latter.) I'm pessimistic about conservatives' ability to "reclaim... the educational system at all levels," stuff like that just doesn't happen in a top-down way, though I'm 100% supportive of anything that decentralizes education and gets parents more involved (and I'm saying this as someone who got his entire K-12 education from a mix of homeschooling and small Christian schools; it's not an abstract issue for me).
As for foreign policy - well, I written about that before in "The Poland Paradox." At this point I'm fine with letting Russia annex the eastern quarter-or-so of Ukraine, since both sides in that war have suffered enough already, and the Donbass was full of separatists to begin with, and Ukraine will hopefully serve as a wakeup call to other small democracies to get their act together before it's too late. Ultimately the real test of maturity in foreign policy is just admitting that the United States is not the principal actor, and getting used to the fact that decisions made in places like Warsaw and Tokyo and Taipei and Jerusalem and New Delhi are just going to matter more for the future of Eurasia than decisions made in Washington. (Note that this is distinct from the "cut-em-loose" philosophy, which agrees with the interventionists that America is the only liberal power with agency, and only disagrees about how that agency should be used.) So for instance my own brand of "moderate isolationism," contra Kissingerism, would not be bothered in the slightest if Taiwan acquired nuclear weapons.