“There Is A Providence That Protects Idiots, Drunkards, Children, And The United States Of America”

Whatever becomes of Donald Trump -- he's been declared done any number of times since 2015, remember -- it's worthwhile to keep in mind the remark attributed to Bismarck in this post's title.

There's nothiing unique about Trump as a Republican. Abraham Lincon was regarded as an uncouth, insurgent, and divisive figure throughout his political career. The insurgent Republican tradition continues through Coolidge, Nixon, Goldwater, Reagan, and Newt Gingrich. In that context, there's nothing really new about Trump. I've tried to explain this to my Ivy League schoolmates to no avail. They won't even listen when I try to tell them how similar he is to Harry Truman.

As Bp Robert Barron puts it, we've been here before,

My friends want to maintain a picture of Trump independently whipping the population up into a frenzy of xenophobia and racism, ignoring the fact that legal immigrants and minorities support him in unprecedented numbers. The reality is that Trump is exploiting -- opportunistically if you want to say so -- decades-long trends in US society. These will continue, and others will pick them up, regardless of Trump's fate, and notwithstanding attempts to suppress them. These include:

• Creeping obsolescence of corporate media, including books, magazines, newspapers, film, television, polls, and professional sports
• Decline in value of college educaton and renewed status of blue-collar work
• Terminal decline of main line Protestantism and resurgence of Evangelical churches -- these are by no means new
• Declining trust in elite institutions, including the Ivy League and the CIA
• Overall reddening of the country's political spectrum
• Long-standing tensions within the Republican Party
• The changing nature of the US conservative movement.

I had a blog with this current title in the header for several years before 2011, where I was making much more tentative attempts to grapple with these themes. I've resurrected the title, with almost the same url, because I think I'm returning to many of the same issues.

Before the pre-2011 blog, I was involved in the Dartmouth alumni trustee movement, and in fact during its final agonies, I was approached to become a candidate for the next trustee election. (I had far too much partying in my time there and far too few donations to the alumni fund to take this seriously, and I turned them down.)

During that period, I was one of very few non-students to contribute regularly to The Dartmouth Review, an insurgent publication patterned after Buckley's Nat\onal Review. I learned a lot, but when the alumni trustee movement went permanently south, I suppressed my memories. It looks like I need to bring them back and talk about them, among many other things. (As far as I can tell, my articles there are no longer in the archives.)

As Bp Barron suggests, I've been here before, too. It looks like this effort won't be new, it'll be a resumption, or maybe a resuscitation, after a roughly ten-year detour and re-educaton in Anglicanism, Catholicism, Aristotelianism, post-Reformaton history, and quite a bit else. (I deleted the first Mt Hollywood blog from Blogger in 2011. Apparently some or all of it can be found on archive apps. However, my views then were to some degree inchoate.)

Hang on.