To successfully construct a new paradigm, we need to first deconstruct the old one and learn from the lessons it teaches.

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Visualize America as a house. The construction of our house, like all houses, started with the foundation. Our foundation was designed to be eternally rock-solid by brilliant but flawed men in 1787… which is lucky for us because without a strong foundation the stability of our entire house would have been vulnerable from the very beginning. The walls of our house were constructed with the durable planks of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Both our foundation and walls were built from a blueprint that envisioned the strongest, most resilient republic ever conceived.

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By the beginning of the 20th-century our house was looking awesome! It was bright and shiny, much stronger and more expensive than all the other houses around the world, and, thanks to the wealth brought by oil, steel and industrial development, our house was carefully maintained. Electrical power provided light for our house; steam engines and railroads became its roadway; and farming, ranching and mining found fertile ground in its backyard.

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Despite the economic shock of the Great Depression, after World War II our home’s occupants became better educated, gainfully employed and more mobile. Unemployment plummeted, consumer demand exploded, and suburbs flourished. In fact, our house looked so perfect from the outside that very few guessed it would soon be in danger of slowly rotting from within.

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But unfortunately, that is what gradually started to happen. Political scandals like Watergate and the Iran-Contra Affair – along with the corruption introduced by powerful lobbyists and well-financed special interests – began to erode the public’s trust in its leaders and planted seeds of disappointment and disrespect toward the White House, Congress, and other government institutions.

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At the same time, the energy crisis in the 1970s, the savings and loans fiasco, and massive accounting scandals planted seeds of anger and animosity toward private enterprise, well before the 2007-2009 Financial Crisis solidified the outrage. The subprime bank bailout was particularly hard to swallow because the United States has consistently had the largest wealth divide between the rich and the poor for decades. Meanwhile, moral catastrophes like Vietnam, Guantánamo, the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and Hurricane Katrina called into question our national core values and threatened our global image.

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Overlaying all of this, the ghosts of our past remained active and destructive, especially for American Indians and black Americans. In truth, our house has been haunted for centuries. The scars branded as far back as Point Comfort, Virginia in 1619 and the massacres at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811 remain painfully evident for many of these Americans. Generations of pervasive and persistent disparity and discrimination have taken an egregious toll on members of these communities, populations uniquely susceptible to the inequitable cycles of preceding generations.

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It’s in this weakened condition that our beloved house stood. With a damaged foundation and unstable walls, our house was already under threat of being reduced to kindling – just barely able to hold its own weight. But then…

 

Into this perfect storm walked Donald Trump…holding a match.