First, the Presidency is a position of service. Trump cannot understand this and thinks it's a position of power. His whole life has been about aggrandizement. It still is.
The factors in the America we have now:
The Enlightenment liberalism of Washington,(1) Jefferson, Lincoln, MLK, Orwell, etc., which is about friendship, cooperation, and making improvements. Place most elected Democrats here.
The neo-Marxism of today's campus left — "oppositional, adversarial, subversive" — as also seen in the kind of punditry which prostrated itself before Ta-Nehisi Coates during his fifteen minutes of fame.
The re-emergent plantation mentality(2) of today's Republicans, looters heartless about the wretched and the poor. Former British conservative Andrew Sullivan says they're not remotely conservative; and I think he's right.
The media totally confuse the issue by treating the liberalism above and the above leftism as more or less synonymous, which does not work at all.
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(1) Washington's Farewell Address:
“Relying on its kindness in this as in other things, and actuated by that fervent love towards it, which is so natural to a man who views in it the native soil of himself and his progenitors for several generations, I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.”
Here, as in his Inaugural Address, Washington refers to “the public good.”
(2) Garrison Keillor in Homegrown Democrat:
“My life depends on the social compact that Republicans are determined to overthrow, cutting taxes and killing off public services and reducing us to a low-wage no-services plantation economy run by an enclave class that I do not wish to be part of, no matter how graceful or thoughtful they are. … ” p. 227
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