Let’s stipulate that Donald Trump is a vulgar, ignorant and often reckless narcissist. Yet he also may well prove a historical necessity, someone who, intentionally or not, has rendered apart a bi-partisan consensus well past its usefulness.
Religious people like to say that God works in mysterious ways. The same can be said about history. Bad players can have important long-term effects. With their mad ambitions Napoleon and Hitler established a continental idea now reflected in the more benign bureaucratic empire of today’s EU, while Karl Marx’s legacy led to a making of modern and economically independent China, now the world’s ultimate expression of state capitalism.
Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.
Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.
Photo: Arrorro [CC BY-SA 3.0], from Wikimedia Commons