RIDGWAY, Colo. — It’s different in the West. It’s easier to feel in touch with some essence of what America is. The space, so much of it still, so empty, so awe-inspiring, speaks of American possibility. The boundlessness invites reinvention and prickly individualism. Here in Colorado, purple state, split between gun lovers and legal marijuana lovers, the libertarian streak runs strong.

That’s the bit of the United States the rest of the world finds hardest to fathom. Why the scorn for handouts, the equating of universal health care with socialism, the obsession with self-reliance, the refusal to see that a profusion of guns leads to a profusion of mass shootings? Of course a crowded Europe with its wounds seeks solidarity in the name of stability, while America with its wide-open spaces embraces the right to be left alone (at least until you need Medicaid) and the right, whatever its risks, to the next frontier.

I said it’s different in the West. It’s not so different in the West, it’s just that you see more clearly what the country stood for in its own mythologized self-image, what it was to be an American, what it was to aspire to some new and exemplary measure of freedom, and how far things have fallen to produce President Donald Trump.

No part of the country today is immune to American fracture or the squalid Trump wars, to cultural confrontations over identity and gender and race, to the effects of stagnant incomes over decades, or to the narcissism of modernity.

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There’s a deeper question, which comes back to the extraordinary Western landscape and the high American idea enshrined in it. Americans elected Trump. Nobody else did. They came down to his level. White Christian males losing their place in the social order decided they’d do anything to save themselves, and to heck with morality. They made a bargain with the devil in full knowledge. So the real question is: What does it mean to be an American today? Who are we, goddamit? What have we become?

Trump was a symptom, not a cause. The problem is way deeper than him.

For William Steding, a diplomatic historian living in Colorado, American individualism has morphed into narcissism, perfectibility into entitlement, and exceptionalism into hubris. Out of that, and more, came the insidious malignancy of Trump. It will not be extirpated overnight.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/opinion/trump-colorado-purple-state.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage