So you probably have already seen a lot of speculative press on what to expect from a Trump presidency. I wouldn’t bet on much of it, particularly the policy stuff. It will change some, but it remains to be seen whether Trump is able to press ahead with even half of what he promised, or half of the ideas promoted by starry-eyed supporters. But we’ll see.
I suppose there are a few things I will bet on, consistent with my cynicism. For example, the crybaby SJWs will take a major whipping in the coming months. I suppose there will be a measure of patience with the riots we read about in the mainstream news, and it will vary with how liberal the local governments are. Some are downright sympathetic to the riots. However, most of them will eventually get tired and the crackdown will be violent. The social trend of hating police will quickly lose its luster as a Trump presidency emboldens those who revere police and military. This is the right-wing backlash I saw coming a long time ago. Meanwhile, prepare for major scolding from the mainstream press.
There will be some breakage in commercial media, though. Their time is past, but they won’t die quietly. Keep in mind that their single hook is entertainment value. If they don’t entertain, they can’t push their agenda. The audience willing to pay for extravagant entertainment value is going broke, not to mention aging and dying. So there will be a tiny die-hard group who will cling to it with nostalgia, but the big budget stuff will crumble into poverty while the computer-generated stuff will get better and take over the market. The day of the independent (“indie”) producer has come, and the centralized conglomeration is dying. Yes, all of this is tied into how the mainstream media will come apart: they have lost their audience and their income. Their liberal social mythology, written into everything they produce, will fade away. We’ll still have great entertainment, but the underlying value system will shift.
I suspect it will hit the academic industry in the same way. The entire system of certification will be shaken. I cannot guess how much will disappear, nor what the replacement will look like to us, but too many of the sacred institutions of higher learning will not adapt and will not survive.
That’s enough commentary from me. I think my regular readers can pick up their own thoughts from here. We are in for a rough ride, because this kind of mass breakage is not easily contained. It’s not so much what Trump will do, but that he dropped into a tumultuous time and found a good place to stand. He’s not really a good guy, just very different from his predecessors.
Addenda: In response to an offline query — If Trump manages to leverage his power to go after the biggest globalist liberals in Washington, and tear apart their institutions and money, he might actually change things a great deal. It would require he start early and rather quietly, announcing only those measures that would appeal to the masses who voted for him. This means riding the backlash that already exists, mining it for popularity, with a nuanced balance between efficient brutality and magnanimous mercy. It’s not that he doesn’t have it in him, but I don’t know if he and his position are strong enough to actually dominate that way.
Pardon my ignorance/senior moment but what does SJW stand for?
Bruce, that’s the common abbreviation for “social justice warrior.” It refers to folks who are highly activist in promoting political correctness (PC).
Interesting thoughts, particularly, in relation to the academic industry. I sure wouldn’t mind if this industry became more of a “marketplace of ideas.” Not that I think diplomacy is entirely lacking in such settings, but from my experience, especially with a discipline like sociology, you only hear the left side of things. But there are more conservative thinkers whose material is certainly applicable to sociological learning, people like Theodore Dalrymple, Roger Scruton, Larry Elder. You don’t hear much about them though cause it’s all about Marx or Foucault, apparently.