Friends and enemies abroad are becoming variously shocked, disheartened—and gleeful—as the United States cannibalizes itself.

Donald Trump campaigned on ending foreign wars. In his view, conflicts wasted American lives and treasure for nothing. Once in office, Trump set an end to U.S. involvement in Syria and began to wind down deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. He raised doubts about whether the United States would honor treaty commitments to defend European and Asian allies. On the other hand, Trump also kept war as a regular tool of foreign policy. 

A century ago, as the United States recovered from a worldwide pandemic and a major war, a presidential candidate wisely and successfully called for “a return to normalcy.” Warren G. Harding, in a campaign speech in 1920, could well have been speaking to people today when he said the “need was not heroics but healing, not nostrums but normalcy.”

California’s political paradox is that voters chronically elect politicians who double down on the failed policies of their predecessors. This means that California’s major economic problems—housing affordability and homelessness, cost of living and the highest poverty rate in the country, inadequate water supply, wildfires, underperforming schools, failing infrastructure, unsustainable pensions, the list goes on—continue to deteriorate.