OK, I’ll admit, I was one of those liberals that didn’t get the Trump thing. While I might not have been as addicted to the daily outrage flung up the flagpole by the media as some, I entertained a lingering, if small, hope that he would do something so outrageous, or better yet, illegal, that he would be ousted and things would get back to “normal.”

But lately, as I’ve had to defer things because I can’t afford them, like a graduate certificate, or buying a home, I’ve started wondering. Why am I clinging to this supposed “normalcy?” What is so great about the way things are going in this country that I am hanging on to them with grim, thoughtless, white-knuckled tenacity?

I mean, yes, government does do a few things, perhaps more than a few, pretty well. My potholes get filled (sorry, Arkansas). My mail shows up on time, every day. My electricity runs without fail, notwithstanding minor interruptions from Mother Nature, a tax for living around lots of trees which I’m happy to pay for the privilege. My meat is safe, my medicines are what they say they are, and my car gets decent gas mileage and will deliver me unharmed from most altercations with other vehicles. Many take this stuff for granted, but I don’t.

But about everything else that interfaces with my daily life, not so much good. People like me like to try to pick things apart into smaller, manageable bits and come at them that way. The opioid crisis. The longevity crisis. The obesity crisis. Food deserts. Minimum wage. Corporate bonuses. Health care.  Like picking fruit off of a tree in hopes the tree will stop bearing fruit.

The problem isn’t the fruit, though. It’s the tree. The way our economy runs and our government’s interaction with it does not work any more. We are suffering from a much larger crisis, that of an entire middle class that has been stripped of the ability to make a decent living. The number of jobs that enable families to afford a house, two cars in the garage, and a stay-at-home mom has significantly atrophied. Even manufacturing jobs, the few that are left, do not pay enough to support a family all by themselves. And as for a higher education, not only is that no longer a guarantee of a better opportunity, but it saddles one with crushing debt. An enormous swath of this country has been priced out of the market of making a living.

And they know it. Maybe not in the way that I can see it, bright lines against a black background, but they feel it. Because there is no other way that people, good people, would hold their noses and pull a lever for Trump, unless they were in desperate straits. They knew what they were getting. None of these scandals surprise them. They just had to send a signal. Something has to change. Not a bunch of little somethings. One big something. And Trump was all they had and so they offered him up. Don’t you get it?  

The New Deal isn’t new any more, and it isn’t a good deal. It’s long past time that people stop saying “Americans need a leg up” – which most of them would eschew anyway – and admit that our whole system is failing and we need to think seriously about scrapping the entire mess and doing something else. If we can’t apply some downward pressure on the costs of living – all of them – fewer and fewer people will be able to afford them, and that is a recipe for dangerous discontent. If something big isn’t done, or if people don’t sense that their government is at least trying to do something – something real, something important, something they can see happening in their own lives – then Trump isn’t an aberration. He’s just the beginning. And there won’t be fewer people voting for him and those like him.  There will be more.  And I might be one of them.