Good analysis - and well written! Agreed that Trump is just a symptom.

I can't help but wonder how inevitable this is. If you look at world history, there seems to be a ‘life cycle’ of empires (and, yes, we are an empire, much more like the Roman one than, say, the Russian, British or Athenian/Delian). What seems to happen is that it stars out with general cooperation to fight a common enemy, but then the rich get richer, inequality grows, and, finally, cooperation falls apart.

That said, we might have a way to somewhat turn this around — and this may be a situation in which two problems have the seeds of solving each other. Given the way the Republicans have ‘Benghazied’ the notion of a Green New Deal and global warming in general, we need to not call it that — but whatever infrastructure we build to deal with it is going to have to be on the scale of the Interstate highway system — which means loads of no-college-degree-required jobs, and union jobs at that. Good jobs is a start but doesn’t solve the issue of inequality. And I take your point of voters not feeling listened to. I wonder if some kind of council made of union leaders, working with the administration, might be able to provide some of that, as well as input into what gets built in that ginormous infrastructure project.