The Trump effect: update to matrix

I wrote last week with an analysis of Trump's plundering of the social capital locked up in public civility to serve his campaign in the short-term. But the more I thought about it over the weekend, the more I realized that I hadn't gotten it quite right. So I'm providing an update here:

First, in the last version, I loaded fragile and fundamental with too much value judgement. I even alluded to this in my post-script to the previous post, where I said that there was a value judgment inherent to the way I had drawn the matrix, where making institutions more fragile was implied as being "bad", while building up fundamental institutions was implied as being "good". But we know this can't be right, maybe not even half the time. All we have to imagine is a fundamental cultural institution that has grown unwieldy, inefficient, and no longer able to properly serve the needs of its constituency. I think we can all agree that automobile traffic in LA, Atlanta, DC, Dallas, and other major, fast-growing cities has become truly awful. Efforts to build up alternative institutions are underway. Once the short-term benefits of the alternatives outweighs the short-term costs associated with switching to the alternatives, then the cultural institution of driving everywhere will begin to erode. This would be disruptive (since there will be losers) and yet not laden with negative connotations. Indeed, I've changed the two "process" arrows to disruption and systems building to remove some of the value judgment.

Second, the previous matrix implied that Trump's strongman effect was the major reason for the erosion of the institution of public civility. In fact, that institution has been undergoing significant erosion since the advent of mass media, dog-whistle politics (predominantly wielded by the political right in the US) a half a century ago, and a 7-year GOP-led obstructionist campaign against the country's first black president. All Trump has done is to take advantage of that long-term erosion and fragmentation of civility's "constituency" to deliver the critical strike to an already weak institution, and pick up a large constituency in the process. By selling public civility at what amounts to fire-sale prices, he is securing a short-term, personal advantage at tremendous social cost. Now, the constituency is not only fragmented ... part of it has been zapped off the map entirely. So I moved the strongman effect out of the matrix and labeled it as a way in which fragile cultural institutions are destroyed for personal political gain.

Third, I originally labeled the y-axis to read "high significance" and "low significance", but I've changed these to high stakes and low stakes. In part, I did this to help segue into the next post (which is about the time scale of change). Also, I made this change because it's more precise language. But mostly I changed it because power is wielded and dramatically changes hands if and only if the stakes are high. The word "significance" just didn't seem to capture that.

I plan to continue to iterate on this ... as I said in this blog's introductory post, I'm writing to force myself to write, not because I have all the answers.