I Have the Answer

I don't, really. But I have an explanation--for Trump and the decline and demise of America. It's the Civil War, which never ended and has now been won by the Confederacy. The country was not designed to endure a semi-permanent insurrection of states voting consistently and as a bloc and inimically to the core precepts of its founding and its traditions.

It's over as of now--we are living in the Confederacy--but it could be reversed and we could again see an age of e pluribus unum. For now there is no unum--only factionalism. The overriding problem is the lack of accountability. With Trump, for example, he will want to be seen as having done a good job but that has become disconnected from doing a good job. 

There is no accountability and that is the result of forty-plus years of Republican hegemony and, at a personal level, the lesson of Trump's life, as a matter of privilege and property, the holy things of existence in the South stemming from segregation and slavery. But anything other than judging people by behavior and standards of conduct is racism. 

Inequity and unfairness have now been embraced, on average, by the entire nation but it has been a close thing even in the face of the rebel insurrection and the insane amount of money poured into the electoral system by militant, self-serving capitalists. The nation as a whole has held up well. Its system was never intended for this kind of assault from within.