"How can things be getting concretely better than they were during the Obama years when expert opinion insists things are getting worse?"

In American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson tells us what he has been seeing as he drives

on different routes through the vast San Joaquin Valley back and forth from the California coast—and through the usually economically depressed small towns on and near the Highway 99 corridor through the Central Valley.

...New housing construction is growing after roughly a decade’s hiatus, at least to the degree carpenters, electricians, and plumbers can be found. Upward mobility is evident. At the local Walmart, the checkers often tell me they’re leaving despite raises—for better-paying jobs. I drive home to my farm by a new warehouse that seems under endless construction. I finally ask the neighboring business, why? Answer: they cannot find or keep workers. The same reply comes from a friend redoing his house. Painters and floor workers no sooner start to paint and tile than they are hired away. Many now working have never held a fulltime job.

I do not know what the state’s figures on current public assistance show or could reveal, but when in line at the local grocery stores, I see less use of EBT cards than I did three years ago. Far less common is the shopper who pulls out four or five of them under various names. People have not become more honest. But they are in demand and making more money in a way not true prior in the 21st century. Labor has gained some leverage over the employer. Or rather the private sector is regaining ground on the administrative state. The fact of being needed and wanted makes a worker nearly as happy as increased compensation, this notion that he is not just appreciated, but desperately sought out by an employer far more eager to hire than to fire him.

The sense that the border may be closing, or that even in California ICE still deports criminal illegal aliens, has caused some self-deportation or perhaps slowed down the number of new illegal arrivals. Either way, American citizens, many of them of Mexican or Central American ancestry, have less competition for unskilled jobs and the rise in wages shows it. Employers do not pay more because they like paying more than the minimum wage but because they have no choice. How odd that the purported ogre Trump has ended West Coast sanctimonious talk over jacking up the minimum wage.

The media’s hatred of Trump is not necessarily determinative, but it is a force multiplier of the 24/7 unhinged narrative of the universities, popular culture, and Hollywood. Their shared goal is to make saying that one supports the Trump agenda so socially unpalatable, so culturally Neanderthal, that no sane person wishes to confess his delight with a new economy, foreign policy, and approach to the administrative state.

Amid the conundrum over Trump’s sometimes silly tweets, his 90-minute stand-up comedy routines at rallies, his spats with “fake news,” and the blood feud with the political lobby at CNN, what is lost in the calculation are these facts on the ground far from Washington, where slowly but undeniably life is getting better for the those in entry-level jobs among the forgotten near the bottom—and perhaps much better for the middle and upper-middle classes.

...We are supposed to be in a near racial war. But the melting pot of the San Joaquin Valley seems unusually calm, the unity of wanting to make money is trumping the disunity that follows not finding a job.

I am now on a brief annual teaching stint at Hillsdale College in southern Michigan, in one of the poorer areas of the state. Here, too, things strike the stranger as far better than they were five years ago. There are more factory jobs in this greater automotive circumference. The food lines seem shorter, people more confident. There are more roads being paved, houses painted, and stores spruced up.

In sum, we are witnessing one of the great ironies of the modern age. Minorities who are not Trump supporters are doing better under Trump than any past president, liberal or conservative. Environmentalists who despise him know that America has become more effective than its green European critics in reducing carbon emissions, largely through the breakneck production of natural gas. Diplomats who loathe Trump find their good cop talk and soft power has more resonance once it is backed up by a better military, a better national security team, and an unpredictable commander-in-chief who might just be capable of doing anything at any time to anyone anywhere in the defense of American interests and sovereignty.

How can things be getting concretely better than they were during the Obama years when expert opinion insists things are getting worse?

The simple answer is that for half the country Trump’s crudity trumps his cunning on the economy and foreign policy. That irony prompts the essential question of this presidency: could crudity have been the accelerant that pushed his agenda forward? And if so, what does that say about those who led us who were far less crude and far less competent—and far less worried about the consequences of their policies upon those whom they rarely ever saw? Or rather what is crudity when mellifluousness did such damage? And what is morality when a lot of ruin was done by those who claimed by birth, education, reputation, ZIP code, or influence to be so much better than those they hurt?

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