SLATE article: "Trump is Weaker Than He Looks"

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

37. On one hand you are absolutely right.

On the other, they've reduced funding for everything, including the infrastructure. I'm not sure they fully understand that they need safe bridges -- actually bridges are a huge problem. The collapse of I25 in Minneapolis was nearly 10 years ago now, and I don't believe bridges have been noticeably strengthened since then. Bridges are catastrophes waiting to happen. It's my impression that they think they are somehow magically protected from the deliberate neglect of the infrastructure.

After all, things like the bridge collapse in Minneapolis don't happen every day. Heck, it's been almost a decade so how bad can things be? But things can be very bad. I'm sure citizens of the Roman Empire didn't fully appreciate how bad things were until it was too late. Which took hundreds of years.

Similarly, this country is past its peak. My personal take is that the peak was around 1965, but historians a couple of centuries from now will be better placed to figure the date. Clearly (at least it's clear to me) by the time Ronald Reagan became President we'd crested the hill and had started the very long, slow, but inevitable downward slide. Most people can't begin to recognize this, because our country still has the money and the wherewithal to maintain bases around the world, to finance new jets, send soldiers off to innumerable endless wars. But make no mistake. We are in the sunset of the American Empire.

One of the ways you can tell is the crumbling infrastructure. Not just roads or airports, but hospitals, schools, the general social contract.

Shall we discuss schools? For a couple of decades now the prevailing meme is that public schools are terrible, they are failing, teachers are incompetent. While I'm not about to go into those things in detail, consider this: If our schools are so awful, why are so many of our colleges and universities so hard to get into? It's not because most places are taken by foreign students. Nope. There are more extremely well-qualified American students competing with each other. Yes, there are bad schools. There are ones who graduate students who can barely read or write. But that's connected to race, class, and the money invested in those public schools.

Anyway, if you're right (meaning I'm wrong) about the infrastructure thing, I'll be glad. Because investing in the infrastructure might actually lead to investing in other things, like public schools. But I'm not holding my breath.