THE AMERICAN CRISIS: CHRONICLING and CONFRONTING the TRUMP SHITSTORM

By Frank S. Robinson

The American Crisis: Chronicling and Confronting the Trump Shitstorm; Verity Press International; 247 pages; $12.95 (+ $4.50 shipping in USA). Payment by check, credit card, Paypal or Zelle; Frank S. Robinson, Box 8600, Albany, NY 12208; 518-482-2639; frank@fsrcoin.com

"These are the times that try men's souls," Thomas Paine wrote in The American Crisis.It was late 1776, and bleak, the American forces losing. Paine aimed to inspire them.

Then Washington crossed the Delaware, a surprise attack, defeating the British at Trenton. Saving our nascent country. This history has always spoken powerfully to me, an idealist rather than a cynic, a realist nevertheless believing the human project is a great good thing. And an optimist by temperament — starting my “Rational Optimist” blog, in 2008.

Since 2016 I, like Paine did, have seen America in crisis. This book is a chronological, edited selection of my relevant blog essays. They might seem obsessed with Trump. But it’s not just about one man, it’s about the country. Our civic culture has experienced a dramatic discontinuity, whose consequence cannot be overstated. I've tried to grapple with what's happening, to understand and analyze it.

Long politically engaged (I was a conservative Republican), I published my first book about politics in 1973. All the Trump books out there would fill a library. But this one may be somewhat unique in tracing one observer's perspectives on events as they were fresh and raw, echoing the notion of journalism as "the first draft of history."

In every civilization people have always groused that it's going to the dogs, so my writings might sound like crying wolf. But sometimes there really is a wolf. And many were the past civilizations that rose and then did inexorably decline. Yet history also teaches that nothing is inevitable, it all depends on people's choices and actions. God did not ordain America and its democracy eternal. Sustaining it requires us to hold fast to our fundamental values, which too few Americans seem, any longer, to even understand. But I'm not ready to give up on them, being still an idealist and optimist. That's why I've published this.