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Trump may not be sprinting toward Mount Rushmore, but he is all that stands in the way of America's precipitate decline

Obama pursued an America where, as Mitt Romney infamously said, the majority would receive social benefit of some sort from the state. Unskilled foreigners flowed in, food stamp use more than tripled, the average life expectancy in the U.S. declined (slightly), GDP per capita growth flat-lined at under one per cent, the numbers of idle, able-bodied people in the prime of their lives jumped by over ten million, and violent crime rates rose sharply. Obama never precisely defined the society he was seeking, and was fairly popular personally, but enough Americans dissented from the vision and disapproved of the Clintons to give Donald Trump a mandate to stop the advance of the Obama super-state, but without a clear ability to impose his enterprise state. The health-care debate has revealed the weakness of the congressional Republicans, caught between Obama and Trump, disliking (and despised by) both of them. Most Americans are worried at stalled and inept government, a long sequence of fiscal and foreign policy disasters, inadequate education and health care, and terrible abuse of civil rights by prosecutors. It is one of the profound ironies of modern times that the country chiefly responsible for the triumph of democracy in the world is not now a well-functioning democracy.

Trump has fought back on health-care reform, threatening defecting Republican senators with electoral defeat through primaries or splinter candidacies; and he appears to have the horses to put through major tax reform. Questions of personality and style, though sometimes grating, like the fantasies about collusion with the Kremlin, don’t really matter now. Serious observers should forgo snobbery and realize that the future of America is in the balance. Donald Trump may not be sprinting toward Mount Rushmore, but he is all that stands in the way of a precipitate decline of America from its recent summit as the world’s only superpower. Of course, it remains the world’s greatest country, and all countries have their ups and downs, but if America continues to flounder, with a free press and legislators that are largely a disgrace to the professed civic ideals of the country, and toward the flabby condition of a welfare state, the decay will become incorrigible. I still believe Trump will succeed, but if he doesn’t, the U.S will not be the later Roman Empire, but it could cease to be the great and ever-rising America we knew.

National Post

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