We are not here because of Donald Trump; Donald Trump is here because we created the conditions for him to emerge

We are too conditioned to see history in terms of changes rather than continuity.

The political narratives of the day represent the rubble that the historian or political scientist has to clear away in order to reconstruct what really happened. Those reconstructions are often so painful that, instead of being examined by the public and policymakers, they are often completely rejected in favor of a reinforced narrative of "good vs evil" in zero-sum game politics.

Here are two end points for you, from an historian's point of the terminus a quo (beginning point) and terminus a quem (ending point, or, in our case, today):

The real beginning point is between 1948 - 1951, but that would make zero sense to you without a detour through 1968, because that's where most people's major historical misconception about American politics begins.

The 1960s are, of course, famous for the counter-culture, Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, urban riots, and LBJ's extension of the New Deal welfare state. We look back on that as an era of protest, rock music, long hair, and weed. It was, in fact, a year of worldwide social protest and calls for revolution.

It gave birth -- in the eyes of many social commentators -- to the transition from Cold War America to what is often called the "liberal consensus" about human rights (evolved from FDR's "Four freedoms"), the role of the State, and the necessity for even greater democracy. (If you are interested in learning more about the exact nature of the revised social contract that formed this liberal consensus, you cannot do better than the first chapter of Matthew J. Costello's Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America.)

But here's the ugly little secret: the liberal consensus and the social revolution in America was a mile wide and an inch deep. The reality is that the majority of American citizens -- especially white American citizens -- were always significantly more conservative than our popular political narratives suggest.

Most of what you think you know about the presidential election 1968 is wrong.

This can be fully documented, but I am going to give you one overwhelming example to prove my point: the Presidential election of 1968, which pitted Republican former VP Richard Nixon against Democratic VP Hubert Humphrey and the insurgent independent campaign of Alabama Governor George Wallace.