Alan Jacobs


thoughts, mostly in tweet-like form

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The Bush/Clinton era in American political history is definitively over.

Reaganism is over.

It is easier to shame people out of admitting how they’ll vote than to shame them out of voting how they want to.

Clinton had no clear vision, no clear program, nothing positive to offer except a claim to competence — and yet the evidence suggested that she isn’t very competent.

If in the next four years a younger politician can take up the mantle of Bernie Sanders, we’ll have a barn-burner of an election in 2020.

I am not at all confident that Trump will want more than four years of being President, no matter how well or badly his term goes.

Nothing succeeds like success, so anyone hoping that the GOP leadership will act to restrain Trump is whistling past the graveyard. They’ll fall in line.

But I also suspect that Trump is too lazy and disorganized to bring about major change.

Therefore the changes that do come will surely be generated by the GOP leadership in Congress, not by the executive branch.

In the next four years we’ll find out just how powerful the Deep State really is.

There’s a lot of talk about Trump dominating the evangelical vote, but most of the enthusiasm for him came from people who call themselves evangelicals but don’t go to church. Church-going evangelicals stayed home in large numbers. However: people who call themselves evangelicals but don’t go to church are the future of American evangelicalism.

To people saying this election is “the last stand of white supremacy”: if y’all don’t get your act together, it may well be the third-from-the-last stand. A great many of those Trump voters are still going to be voting in 2028, and if they’re producing more children than you are….