I congratulate Tom Turner of Augusta on his clever Nov. 16 letter on the ultra self-absorbed United States (“Tom Turner: Donald Trump is the ideal president for all the wrong reasons”).

I believe what we are seeing is something called hedonic adaptation, a term I learned thanks to Tom Nichols, a brilliant writer at The Atlantic. The idea is that once you get used to something, having it withdrawn is far more painful than never having had it before.

Few Americans, other than the older baby boomers who served in Vietnam and the handful of World War II and Korean War veterans still alive, have ever been asked to sacrifice anything. Instead for the most part our lives have gotten easier and easier.

We expect good jobs, nice houses and cars, and regular vacations. The 2008 financial crisis and especially the pandemic put a crimp in that lifestyle and melted people’s brains. People who feel the loss of status tend to idealize the past. Thus we are seeing efforts to put women back in the home and LGBTQ people back in the closet.

And then there’s the obsession with deporting immigrants. The result may surprise many Trump fans. Immigrants make up about a quarter of the labor in the food supply chain. Deporting them will actually increase the cost of food, because few Americans want to do those difficult, low-paying jobs.

The inflation that led so many people to vote for Trump, remembering 2019 as the good old days, will be back in force if he is able to institute the deportations and tariffs he promised. But will they blame him when prices jump? That remains to be seen.

Holly Rahmlow

Readfield

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