I don’t intend to dehumanize the man. At the bottom of all the chaos he’s catalyzed, Donald Trump is an ordinary mortal. He is a criminal and grifter and predator, but despite all that he remains a human being.
But Donald Trump is also an erupting supervolcano, defacing a continent. He is a plume of gigatons of methane released into the atmosphere by the melting of clathrate ices. He is a comet striking the earth.
In less poetic terms, the Donald Trump presidency is the civic equivalent of what evolutionary biologists call a selective event: a dramatic or even catastrophic change that exposes the organisms of a community to powerful natural selection. Some organisms may survive; many will not. There is a lot about America that I’ve taken for granted my whole life which will disappear, I suspect. I can lament the loss; I can make myself angry thinking about how as a country, we’ve brought the catastrophe down on ourselves. But there’s no sense hand-waving past the magnitude of the changes upon us.
Nor do I have anything to gain by despairing about the situation we face. It’s still important for me to read the news and to engage with the political process, if only because I believe that facing reality is an ethical stance towards the world.
Though it can be fun for science fiction authors to make predictions, I decline to speculate now about what the United States will be like in ten years or even five. Even without the metastasis of Donald Trump, the changes of the next few years would have been cataclysmic: not necessarily all bad, or even mostly bad, but nonetheless deeply altered. As artificial intelligence penetrates ever further into our lives, as the vise grip of anthropogenic climate change tightens the screw one more turn, our lives over the next ten years would have been profoundly different even if the United States had not elected a strongman more in the tradition of a 19th century Latin American country than of a republic with a free press and mature civil society.
Here’s what I will say, though: if America looks unrecognizable after the civic catastrophe of Trumpism, it’s worth establishing for myself–as well as for my students and descendants–what values I will hold to regardless of what’s left of the country when the dust has cleared.
I had the great fortune of doing ecological work on Mount St. Helens from 2009-2011, thirty years after the eruption of 1980. My field site was an area called the Pumice Plain, directly in the pyroclastic flow of the volcano, where 40 meters of 300º-730º C pumice had sterilized the mountainside. For a moment, the Pumice Plain was as barren as the surface of the moon.
And yet, the story of how life reestablished itself on Mount St. Helens was as interesting and impressive as the story of how the Pumice Plain destroyed the forest it replaced. Within a year of the eruption, researchers had found a single dwarf alpine lupine, Lupinus lepidus, had taken root on that barren moonscape:
By the time I got to the Pumice Plain, there were a million of these unassuming, scrappy lupines growing there, as well as Sitka willow saplings and young cedars and Douglas firs and Western hemlocks. Darwin’s entire entangled bank of invertebrates and birds and mammals and amphibians trawled over the new plant life there, trying to work their ecological niches.
I believe that regardless of the forces arrayed against it, democracy is a similarly inexorable force. Whatever remains after the eruption of the years of Trumpism–whether they last from 2016-2028 or from 2016-2116–my allegiances are with the forces of democracy and pluralism. This bedrock commitment stems as much from my faith as a Quaker as it does from my having grown up in a democratic country, and it informs all other civic values that I’ll speak to in coming posts.
The Subway Test 