New York Post: President Trump. Flickr/Marco Verch. Some rights reserved.Long before the final results, many Americans knew that our body politic had suffered a seizure after being injected with a poison that nothing in Hillary Clinton’s politics was potent enough to expel.
The impotence of that kind of politics — its inability to draw from wellsprings deeper than bromides about breaking glass ceilings, “fighting” for families and children, and slashing college tuition — has little to do with Clinton’s character or alleged corruption or even with the undoubted wave of misogyny in this election.
It has a lot more to do with the failure of the American establishment — all of it, from Wall Street to business-corporate management to the pundits and politicians in Washington — to respect and, yes, to nurture the civic-republican (small “r”) virtues and beliefs that a liberal-capitalist has to rely on but that neither the liberal state nor markets do very much to sustain or defend. The liberal state can’t do it because it’s not supposed to judge between one way of life and another. Markets can’t do it because their very efficiency and productivity depend on approaching consumers and investors as narrowly self-interested for business purposes.
