The day after the election last fall, Kotkin, of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, conversing with Justin Vogt of Foreign Affairs, expressed impatience with those who say of Trump, “That’s not who we are.” Kotkin asked, “Who’s the ‘we’?” Trump, he said, is not “an alien who landed from some other planet”:?“This is somebody the American people voted for who reflects something deep and abiding about American culture. Think of all the worlds that he has inhabited and that lifted him up. Pro wrestling. Reality TV. Casinos and gambling, which are no longer just in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, but everywhere, embedded in daily life. Celebrity culture. Social media. All of that looks to me like America. And yes, so does fraud, and brazen lying, and the P.T. Barnum, carnival barker stuff. But there is an audience, and not a small one, for where Trump came from and who he is.”?Many Americans today resent sharing citizenship with an approximately equal number of other Americans. Each group abhors the other’s politics and, perhaps as important, their manners.
