Richard Florida, senior editor at The Atlantic, writes here about Jane Jacobs’ 2005 book, Dark age Ahead, and says it is an eerie prediction of the Trump phenomenon. She explains why it happened and how to survive.

This is is a must-read article.

Florida writes:

“At a time when pundits and political scientists were celebrating the end of history, pointing to an emerging Democratic majority and extolling the virtues of a flat world of globalization, she ominously predicted a coming age of urban crisis, mass amnesia, and populist backlash in her final work, Dark Age Ahead. Eerily prescient as always, rereading the 2005 book today serves as a survivors’ guide to the Age of Trump.

“Jacobs outlines an increasing distrust of politicians and politics, a burgeoning new urban crisis in cities, worsening environmental degradation, entrenched segregation, and an “enlarging gulf between rich and poor along with attrition of the middle class” as signals and symptoms of a coming Dark Age.

“Nationalism and xenophobia form the core of Jacobs’ Dark Age. “Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society’s decline from cultural vigor,” as “self-imposed isolation” leads to “a fortress mentality,” she writes….

“According to Jacobs, our own dark age is taking shape around the erosion of “five key pillars” of society.

“The first is the decline of family and community. The same politicians who call families the foundation of society undertake policies that weaken and undermine them. The replacement of extended families with nuclear ones make it impossible for many to cover the cost of housing. Falling birth rates mean a smaller workforce to take care of an aging population.

“At the same time, the broader community falls victim to market pressures, materialism, and the hegemony of brands. Jacobs points especially to the automobile as a “destroyer of worlds” that not only wastes energy and promotes sprawl, but skews priorities from public interest to self-interest.

“The second is the decline of education, which has been transformed into vocational training. Education becomes an individualistic investment instead of a public good that produces well-rounded citizens. When that happens, jobs and profit become the sole measure of progress and ultimate justification for political choices, at the expense of everything else.

“The third is an attack on science, or what she calls false analogies that mask reality. “If a body of inquiry becomes disconnected from the scientific state of mind, that unfortunate segment of knowledge is no longer scientific,” she writes. “It stagnates.” Objectivity and scientific progress are replaced with dogma.

“The fourth pillar is the “dumbing down” of taxes. In place of public investments that build cities and societies, taxes and government investment come to be seen as waste. The result is that all sorts of public goods—education, transit, infrastructure and the social safety which contribute to a functioning and cohesive society—start to break down. Jacobs perceptively identifies the looming “new urban crisis” of unaffordable housing, gaping inequality, escalating sprawl, and congestion facing cities as the result of this sort of attack on taxes and public investment.

“The fifth and final pillar is the subversion of the “learned professions” such as medicine, law, architecture, engineering and journalism. We cannot possibly learn every facet of the world, so professions are needed to instill trust and maintain common welfare. Doctors, for example, adhere to a Hippocratic Oath. Lawyers have ethical requirements to adhere to. When such professions come under attack and their norms and functions are undermined, Jacobs notes, society falls victim to the whims of “frauds, brutes, and psychopaths.”

It all sounds very familiar.

A few people have written to say that I should ignore Trump and focus on education.

I have explained that it is impossible to do that because Trump wants to destroy public education. He has chosen a Secretary of Education who has no experience in public schools, never attended them, never sent her children to them, views them with contempt. She is an evangelical Christian and a billionaire. She wants to use the schools to spread her religion. She has spent millions of dollars on political candidates who share her views. She will inflict immense harm on public education, which is a central feature of our democratic society.

Trump himself is a product of military school and private school. His own children attended a private school (The Hill School) where the tuition is $50,000 a year. He doesn’t want that kind of elite education for other people’s children. He wants federal education funds to be used to put children into charter schools, cybercharters, and religious schools.

No high-performing nation in the world has privatized its public schools. Every child should have access to a great public school, no matter where they live or what their zip code. Every child should have access to a school with small classes and experienced teachers; to beautiful facilities and an excellent curriculum; to schools with arts classes staffed by arts teachers; to libraries with qualified librarians; to schools that value play, imagination and creativity more than test scores; to schools and teachers dedicated to the development of every child.

In the Trump-DeVos era, public education won’t be wiped out completely, but it will certainly be seriously weakened. Education spending will be flat or reduced, and public schools will be forced to cut funding, lay off teachers, lose electives, and increase class sizes. Public schools will be starved because they will have no priority in the Trump years. The absurdity of this approach to federal policy should be obvious since there is no evidence to support it and clear evidence from Chile and Sweden that free-market policies fail in education. Trump and DeVos could look closer to home–Detroit, Milwaukee, New Orleans, D.C.–to see that school choice produces segregation and inequity, not better education.

Trump is a menace to democratic values (small d). By his appointments, Trump has shown his disdain for science, knowledge, research, evidence, and even for the people who voted for him. He is a demagogue. Period.

Let me be clear: If you admire Trump, this is not the blog for you. I will be unsparing in my critique of education policies that harm children, teachers, or public schools. It is impossible to think or talk about a “better education for all,” when we have a president who believes in privatization, disparages science, and cares not at all for equity or excellence.,

William Cavanagh, professor of Catholic Studies at DePaul University patiently explains to working people who voted for Trump: “You have been hoaxed!”

Billionaires are not populists.

“Dear blue-collar Trump voters,

“Surprise! Judging from Donald Trump’s cabinet choices, it turns out that a narcissistic billionaire who doesn’t pay taxes might not be the champion of the working class after all. Who could have predicted that?…

“I could go on. This administration is a robber baron’s dream come true. Some accuse Trump of betraying his populist message, but I don’t think that Trump is simply being a hypocrite. Trump doesn’t think of any of his cabinet choices as anti-worker, because he thinks being pro-business is the same as being pro-labor. The theory is that if you shower business with benefits, business will create jobs, and that’s good for workers.

“Sometimes it works that way. Certainly there are plenty of good businesspeople out there who care for the common good and for the earth, who listen to their workers and cooperate with them to create strong companies with happy and secure employees.

“But in Trump’s world, businesspeople are the heroes and should be running the country. Power needs to be taken from the government and from the workers and given to corporate executives, who know best. Worker safety, the right to unionize, overtime pay, workers’ compensation, banking regulations, the health of the environment—all these and more are nuisances from the point of view of Trump and friends. They believe that corporate executives will create lots of great jobs if they are unshackled from the fetters of regulators and unions.

“In truth, however, the interests of the owners, and the managers who work for them, will inevitably conflict with the workers’ interests. And when they do, whose side will Donald Trump and friends take? Trump is a wealthy businessman who has surrounded himself with wealthy corporate executives. When push comes to shove, do you seriously think they give a damn about you?”

This billionaire is no populist. He is a nativist, a white nationalist, a demagogue. But not a populist.

Humor, music, and art will see us through the next four years.

Steven Singer discovered a site where you can write a fake Trump tweet.

Try it. My overwhelming urge was to write a tweet where Trump insults me. That felt good, pretending that he cares what I or any other non-billionaire thinks.

Do it soon or the site might disappear, if it hasn’t already.

Money, money, money!

Watch who gets richer over the next four years. It will be a bacchanalia that make the Robber Barons look like pikers.

The New York Times reports that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is pursuing a big deal with Chinese investors. 

On the night of Nov. 16, a group of executives gathered in a private dining room of the restaurant La Chine at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Midtown Manhattan. The table was laden with Chinese delicacies and $2,100 bottles of Château Lafite Rothschild. At one end sat Wu Xiaohui, the chairman of the Waldorf’s owner, Anbang Insurance Group, a Chinese financial behemoth with estimated assets of $285 billion and an ownership structure shrouded in mystery. Close by sat Jared Kushner, a major New York real estate investor whose father-in-law, Donald J. Trump, had just been elected president of the United States.

It was a mutually auspicious moment.

Mr. Wu and Mr. Kushner — who is married to Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and is one of his closest advisers — were nearing agreement on a joint venture in Manhattan: the redevelopment of 666 Fifth Avenue, the fading crown jewel of the Kushner family real-estate empire. Anbang, which has close ties to the Chinese state, has seen its aggressive efforts to buy up hotels in the United States slowed amid concerns raised by Obama administration officials who review foreign investments for national security risk.

Now, according to two people with knowledge of the get-together, Mr. Wu toasted Mr. Trump and declared his desire to meet the president-elect, whose ascension, he was sure, would be good for global business.

Since the election, intense scrutiny has been trained on Mr. Trump’s company and the potential conflicts of interest he will face. But with Mr. Kushner laying the groundwork for his own White House role, the meeting at the Waldorf shines a light on his family’s multibillion-dollar business, Kushner Companies, and on the ethical thicket he would have to navigate while advising his father-in-law on policy that could affect his bottom line.

Gosh, don’t you wish you were invited to that splendid dinner? I have never tasted Chateau Lafitte Rothschild. Only $2,100 for a bottle? Wow!

No worries about funding schools or nutrition or health care. Just greed.

Republicans have decided that they are prepared to spend billions to build the “big, beautiful wall” that Trump promised on the southern border.

When it comes to investing in our children and our future, there is no more money.

But when Trump promised to build a wall across the southern border, which he said Mexico would pay for, well, the Republicans must follow through. They may bankrupt other government programs, but they didn’t care about any of those programs anyway.

There is no reliable price tag on building a border wall, but Trump has estimated the cost at $8 billion. Recent congressional legislation pegged the number at $10 billion, and construction experts say it could be more than double that….

Experts at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimate that Trump’s tax proposals alone could add as much as $7.2 trillion to the deficit in the coming decade. Even-more-conservative estimates, such as those produced by the right-leaning Tax Foundation, concluded that Trump’s tax proposals would create at least a $4.4 trillion budget hole in the same time frame.

The costs of rolling back the ACA are harder to predict. Repealing the entire law would increase deficits by more than $350 billion over a decade, according to a 2015 report from the Congressional Budget Office, which serves as an independent scorekeeper….

During the campaign, the wall was Trump’s signature promise and a raucous rallying cry among his supporters at his large rallies. Trump repeatedly said that Mexico would have to pay for the giant structure, but he also signaled that U.S. taxpayers would be reimbursed for it after its construction.

In a Friday-morning tweet, Trump said: “The dishonest media does not report that any money spent on building the Great Wall (for sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later!”

Republicans are discussing reviving a 2006 law — supported by the GOP and Democrats alike — that gave them authority to construct partial fencing along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border.

The 2006 Secure Fence Act mandated 700 miles of “reinforced fencing” along the southern border as well as enhanced surveillance systems. The full complement of barriers was never completed, and GOP lawmakers think the law provides sufficient authority to proceed with additional construction.

Is there a cure for stupidity?