Trump’s exhortations become more ominous

It was President Calvin Coolidge, a former governor, who said the “business of America is business.” That aphorism-as-operating-system has long seemed unassailable. But with each day that Donald Trump, a former businessman, is in the White House, the business of America looks more and more to be politics.

Trump is even more consumed with politics than the politicians who preceded him in office. And like a boorish host, he’s not content to let others indulge their own tastes; he insists that the rest of us have exactly what he’s having. All politics all the time.

Polarization, of course, descended upon the land before Trump entered the Oval Office. Party identities have been growing more intense, and more definitive. Parents who once worried about the religion of potential in-laws now worry about their political sympathies.

But Trump is aggressively accelerating the politicization of American culture, tugging at the fraying social fabric, elbowing nonpolitical content out of civic space.

His speech to a Boy Scout jamboree in West Virginia showed how eagerly, and thoroughly, he corrupts neutral ground. Facing an audience chock full of boys not even old enough to vote, he sought not to inform or inspire or even entertain. He sought to win a few centimeters of political terrain in his perpetual battle for power, gratification and legitimacy.

He told them their government is a “sewer,” implied that the previous president didn’t care about them and trolled for ditto heads past, present and future with his stale bait about “fake” news.

Trump has been compared to European demagogues who built cults of personality. But in his effort to enlist Boy Scouts in his personal crusade, he brought to mind the catastrophic rapport between Mao Zedong and Chinese youth during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Various factions of Communist youth sought to cleanse China of its own “sewer,” including fake Communists, intellectuals, cosmopolitan elites and anyone they perceived as opposition. They did a lot of awful things in pursuit of their goals, including ritual shaming, torture and murder. The era, which lasted about a decade, was utterly defined and dominated by politics.

There is no healthy, successful society in which politics is all-consuming. We’ll know we are moving beyond the Trump era when politics not only changes, but recedes.

If we’re lucky, the Boy Scouts have already forgotten Trump’s jamboree harangue. They are dreaming of baseball and merit badges, or at least robots and television and video games. Beware kids who are eager to clean sewers.