Every so many decades, American politics goes through a soft revolution.
Some of these moments are more dramatic in scope than others, but they represent a pivot point when one consensus dies and another emerges. It’s hard to deny that we are going through one of these transitions now.
What President Donald Trump is doing in his return to the White House goes far beyond his actions in 2017. In fact, I’d say that to make a comparison to Trump 2.0 you would have to go back to the New Deal, the early days of the Franklin Roosevelt presidency.
Roosevelt brought a progressive movement decades in the making to the White House at a time of deep economic and political uncertainty. He used Jeffersonian and Jacksonian language to promote his New Deal programs, which is ironic given that the progressive theory of governance was almost entirely antithetical to the movements…
