Trumpism is not a policy program; it is a bargain. A plurality of voters, afraid of losing special status they have enjoyed for four centuries, hires the loudest available conman to protect their right to discriminate, pollute, and refuse collective obligation — accepting that they too will be conned, so long as someone else is conned worse.
What follows is an account of how the Declaration of Independence's promise of unalienable rights has been hollowed out by shrink-wrap contracts, a Voting Rights Act gutted by the Supreme Court, and the quiet constitutional triumph of the limited-liability corporation as a fourth source of power beside religion, royalty, and land. The fix is either demographic patience or a new constitutional convention. Neither is safe.
It would not be unreasonable to suppose these generalizations do violence to individual voters; they are intended to describe the center of gravity of each coalition, not its full population.
