Essay: What Trump Voters Got Right

I am not a Donald Trump enthusiast. I do, however, think it's useful to assess Trumpism in an analytical, detached fashion (blame this guy), as opposed to the hyper-partisan mode of . . . well . . . everyone else. Trumpism is not an inexplicable force of nature. Further, while there are bad people among Trump voters, they are not universally bad, nor does it follow that they are all wrong about everything.

I think Trump voters are reacting--at least some of them, some of the time--to a genuine problem. I don't think they've chosen a good solution, but that doesn't mean that the problem isn't there. Specifically:

• The system is in need of radical (in the sense of Latin radix, "root") reform.
• The system is designed to make radical reform impossible.

Rather than going into a long exegesis here, let me instead offer up a case-in-point: my particular bête noire, the extension of Boston's Green Line to Somerville.

• The project been legally mandated since 1990.
• The MBTA already owns the right-of-way, which runs alongside the commuter rail tracks.
• It's supported by virtually everybody.
• It doesn't require any tunnels or complex engineering.
• It's even genuinely useful.

The line is 4.7 miles long. In the 9,944 days since December 31, 1990, the amount of track that has been laid along that 4.7 miles is zero feet, zero inches. If I could snap my fingers and have the line completed overnight, the average rate of construction would have been just about thirty inches per day. 

Of course, the line won't be completed overnight. After the MBTA fired its original contractor, it took them 23 months just to name a replacement. Naturally, no work whatsoever happened in the interim.

Consider that from 1863 to 1869 this country built a railroad from Omaha to Sacramento using black powder, mules, and human muscles. Obviously things were a lot different there and then, and there was both enormous waste and grave injustice involved . . . but still. In six years, the Pacific Railroad laid 1,868 miles of track. In the six years since the so-called "ground-breaking" of the Green Line extension, we've paid a lot of money for virtually nothing.

Multiply that by all the things that the federal and state governments do, and you get the kind of institutional sclerosis that lets the nationalist populist authoritarians take over.

By the way, I think my prognostications here were pretty accurate. Just saying.