Article content continued

Photo by Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images

There is still a manic anti-Trump hard core that talks wildly of “treason” at every opportunity. In the judgment of history these may well be the observers we find most admirable in retrospect, but in the meantime: do they seem to be helping?

The anti-Trump maximalists do have a “boy who cried wolf” problem, whether or not it is of their own making personally. In the eyes of Hollywood-type Democrats, every Republican regime since Eisenhower is a unique, unprecedented and screamingly urgent threat to American democracy. I will no doubt be told that this phenomenon happens because every Republican is, in fact, legitimately worse than the last. Perhaps the division of the U.S. electorate into mutually uncomprehending camps is exclusively the fault of one party, and has nothing to do with past Democratic abuse of cultural instruments that the Democrats undeniably control.

I reject this not so much because I am aligned with Republicans, but more as a believer in pervasive American devolution. Yet I believe equally strongly, on strict empirical grounds, in the robustness of the United States as a system; and I am less inclined than ever to surrender the suspicion that almost everyone overestimates the importance of who the president is — partly because a bad one can inspire pretty fast political realignment. The midterm congressional elections will be held with a long-forgotten fact re-emerging in the American popular consciousness: that much of the president’s power to set foreign policy and foul up trade is actually the property of Congress, and could be reclaimed after a century of careless delegation.

Perhaps some Americans are beginning to consider that it does not matter most whether you are with the good guys in the Trump/anti-Trump drama. Which is not to say you do not want to be one of the good guys. But the opportunity for American millennials, considered as a generation on the cusp of electoral dominance, is not just to kick Trump out, but to renovate the presidency so that the republic can survive having an unsuitable or even compromised person as president. Everybody got that? Are we good? Eyes on the ball, people.