Sam Smith - Missing from our discussions and debates about Donald Trump is something that may be even more troubling, namely that Trump is the beneficiary of major changes in America and not their inventor.
Near the top of this list I’d put the flourishing of television that became a lifelong replacement of books, classrooms and the work one was doing. The average American is provided with daily information created by people funded by corporate advertisers. As for these businesses themselves there are huge changes that have occurred in our lifetimes that have not helped their customers. .
During the first 36 years of my lifetime, our presidents included Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy and LB Johnson. In the most recent 57 of my years the best we’ve been able to come up with have been Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Having a father who was working for FDR, I grew up assuming that progress was almost inevitable, that you just had to be smart and decent to help it. Nobody told me that television and massive corporatism were going to change the game.
The lesson here is not that you just have to get rid of Trump, but rather we need to concentrate much more on things that let him do as well he has. There are others waiting behind him.
