To me, the most shocking thing about Trump’s election is not that he beat the predictions of virtually all the pollsters and poll aggregator/modelers (and me :)). It’s that he violated every bit of conventional wisdom in doing so. And it’s not like it’s untested conventional wisdom either. Trump did or said an incredible number of things, each one of which actually destroyed the election prospects and/or careers of actual politicians in recent memory is incredible. In recent years numerous politicians have actually blown elections/careers by making remarks that were perceived as racist/sexist, not to mention actual accusations of sexual hanky panky, or financial shenanigans and the like. And yet, the same electorate which severely punished other politicians did not punish Trump. To me, one of the main morals of the story is the fickleness of the public and the shallowness of their beliefs.
The truth is that you see it throughout history. You can see violent lurches from one political/ideological extreme to another, in the era of the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Nazism or Communism, and any number of others. Masses of people who ostensibly supported one ideology were suddenly enthusiastic supporters of a radically different one. People who take for granted that this will/could not happen in the US, or Western democracies generally, are ignoring this history, IMHO.
Human nature doesn’t change all that much in such a short time, if ever. And the point is that human nature is deeply rooted and enduring, while the various cultural mores and ideologies are shallow and transient. If you’ve seen in the past few hundred years – or even in our own times in other places – that human nature is capable of atrocious cruelty or any number of other depravities, it’s a mistake to assume that because right now and in this place people resolutely reject such notions means that this can’t change. It can, and extremely quickly.
And the salient point here is that you cannot advocate for things based on the notion that what you have already is “safe”.
I think this is relevant to both liberals and conservative. But the reason this is more relevant to liberals is that liberals are generally the ones trying to change things. All change involves risk. But the specific risk that’s most concerning is when it’s something that has a bad historical record and is based on the notion that things are different now. If things are different now, it’s very possibly only temporary.
As I see it now, the most obvious and dangerous example of this is in immigration and multi-culturalism. If you look at human history – or even at the vast majority of humans today – it’s hard to escape the suspicion that xenophobia is a part of human nature. Any time you have a mixture of different types of people, there’s a high likelihood that the different groups will end up hating each other or worse. If you promote this type of situation, you may well be creating an insoluble problem that will cause enormous trouble down the road. But ISTM that liberals push for these things because they believe people should get along so they will get along, and with progress over time it’s inevitable that they will get along. This seems overly optimistic and naïve to me.
There are other examples too, e.g. whether a welfare state promotes dependency and resentment, and others.
Bottom line is that I think liberals are pushing the envelope in the name of progress. And they think any steps they take are written in stone and represent the arc of history in action. And they may be right. But you never know. They may just be stretching that slingshot tighter and tighter, and who is to say what happens when it finally snaps back.