An interesting blog entry by a native Montanan.
I note this in part because she's a nature writer, and native Montanas are close to nature, like native Wyomingites.
Indeed, I've tended to find since Donald Trump reared his New York overfunded balding head that real Trump backers in my home state either lack education, or tend to be imports. I know part of that is a really harsh judgement, but I don't find too many natives, in any demographic, who are fire breathing Trumpites who are exceptions to this rule. There are, I'd note, educated Trumpites here, for sure, but they tend to be imports.
I think people know what the unrestrained wealth and exploitation mean to Wyoming, and that helps explain it. Wyomingites are, if they are real Wyomingites, conservative/libertarians but not populists really.
Imports who move here, however, including some who claim to be us, or want to be us, often are Southern Populists at heart. Indeed, a couple of years ago I was out in the sticks and saw a giant Stars and Bars flying above somebody's camp tent, something that, when I was young, would stood a good chance of having been ripped down by any native passing by.
I've written a lot about how we got here. The question now, is how we get out. We'll be getting out, one way or another. The question is, however, whether a rational conservatism can emerge that's free of the horrific elements that Trump has interjected into what's passing for conservatism now, or whether it will pass the way the way that French conservatism did after Vichy. I think, frankly, the latter is more likely.
If conservatism can survive Trump, which frankly I very much doubt, when it reemerges it's going to have to rebuild a lot nationally and internationally that Trump and his minions have utterly destroyed. More likely, however, what will emerge after this era is a renewed liberalism countered only by a somewhat middle of the road liberalism. Again, France provides the model. After the Second World War the French Third Republic was dominated by the hard left, including a very powerful communist party, countered only really by a centrist to liberal centrist Catholic party. The French right died.
I suspect that's the country's political future, in a way. Starting in 2026 the Democrats will regain the House and, if Trump is still in power, provide a block to an outraged and increasingly insane Trump. By 2028, the Senate is likely to go Democratic too, assuming it doesn't in 2026. The White House will have a legitimate President following the 2029 election who will almost certainly be a Democrat.
That President, whether he's Republican or Democrat, and who won't be J. D. Vance or Marco Rubio, is going to have a big task in front of him. Part of that will be to repair the international damage done by Trump.
Not all of it will be capable of being repaired. A western world that had depended upon the U.S. to be the world leader of Western ideals will never, and I mean never, trust the U.S. again.
But the U.S. will also be much diminished in the Western Hemisphere, in spite of what Trump, Vance, and Rubio think. In South American a new block will emerge, likely with former major rivals Argentina and Chile as the leadership, but with Brazil, a massive country in extent and population, more significant than the U.S. Canada will be regarded as a serious, educated, intelligent nation by the Europeans. The U.S. will still have weight in the world, but in the way that France or the United Kingdom do now, save for Asia where the U.S. will still be a major presence. We will have been forced to look to the Pacific, as so many in the past have urged us to do in the past, by Trump and the Republican party soiling our relationships with our intellectual home.
Basically, we will have been the kid that left home, got into drugs, and embarrassed everyone. We'll be the Hunter Biden of Western nations.
Domestically, we're going to have a lot of repairs to do. A new President will quietly accept much of what Trump has done in immigration. The damage done to trade economics will likely have repaired by them, the tariffs having by then settled into an economic background as part of a new system which will not generate all that much in income but which countries are by then used to. Businesses won't come back to the U.S. due to them, and the Rust Belt dreamers will have gone on to despair. The Agricultural sector will be barely reviving, I'd guess, from a Trump induced economic collapse by that time.
The U.S. will return to environmental and conservation sanity and begin to try to make up lost ground and lost damage, in part because its role in the world will have been so decreased that it will have no choice. Fools who insisted that we had to grab Venezuelan oil as China was going to will wake up and find that China will, by 2028, be using largely electric, not gasoline, vehicles. Europe won't be far behind, and a U.S. auto industry that will wish to sell will have advanced in this direction, with U.S. consumers, less enamored with a 19th Century economy than Donald Trump, will have as well.
If Trump's "Travis, you're a year too late" petrol pipe dreams will have achieved little, and they will, perhaps a revival of nuclear power might actually make a difference. Like many of Trump's policies, or those who used Trump to gain position, that policy on the margin of his larger policies, would be beneficial. The pipedreams about coal and oil, however, will go nowhere and already are going nowhere. Indeed, Wyoming's coal fortunes, so desperately pinned on Trump, are going nowhere at all, and the price of oil in the state is down in the disastrous levels.
In larger things, people sometimes ponder the existential "problem of evil", that being why does God allow bad things to occur. A common answer is that God does not allow it unless a greater good can come out of it. While I don't want to go so far as to claim to detect a Devine hand at work here, I wonder if a bit if we're going to see something like that occur.
The country that comes out of Trump Drunk in 2028 with a bad hangover is going to be a much lesser nation. Maybe that's a good thing, particularly of Europe, where we derived our culture from, revives to claim a larger place. We'll need to get used to being told what we will do, and like a bratty teenager, which we've proven ourselves to be, we'll have to get used to that. Our Evangelical Puritanism which most Americans assume is Christianity will have taken a sharp hit. Our botching foreign wars will end as nobody will really trust us much as a solo actor. Nations that need alliances, and many do, will look to us only in concert with others, which will make them safer. Taiwan and South Korea will look to Japan, and perhaps to Australia. Europe will look to ourselves. Nobody will care one wit about us, and we'll have to look, pleadingly, to everyone else. Our environmental destructivism will start to come to an end. Our cultural imperialism will come to an end, as nobody will admire a country that could produce such vile characters as Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, or Jeffrey Epstein. Our absolute lust for the wealthy, that came in with Ronald Reagan, who looks less and less like a hero, will come to an end as well as we have to face a Republican ramped up budget crisis the only way we can, taxes, and taxes on the wealthy.
Not all of Trump's legacy, including the tiny positive portions of it, or the negative massive aspects of it, will go away. Trump has destroyed the post World War Two United States. But the country itself will survive, and rebuild, and probably be better than it was before.
Perhaps the U.S. can get back to being the U.S.
Oh, and Greenland will be independent. Americans won't really be welcomed there. The U.S. military won't be there.
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