In 2017, Trump and the ultra-right wrecking crew will continue to roll back history

In his final post on the aftermath of the 2016 election, Walter Dean Burnham looks at where the Trump administration and its allies might be leading the US. Looking to history to analyze the present, he writes that the American political universe is based on a liberal individualist tradition, which led to a depoliticization of left-wing voters by the 1960s. This in turn allowed the Republican Party to shift the political spectrum to the right in the 1980s and beyond, a shift which eventually led to the rise of Donald Trump.