Stormy time roils politics and nature

Inevitably, inexorably, nature will always trump politics. Science teaches us that.

Just now, both the natural world and the political atmosphere are in tumult. A catastrophic storm is attacking the Carolina coastline, and a turbulent presidency is wracking our political system. Each leaves us feeling edgy and endangered. But there's some comfort in a sense of the certainty of how things go that science can give us.

Consider, for example, Newton's third law, one of those precepts that we were supposed to learn in middle school. It's usually rendered as, "To every action there is always an opposed equal reaction," suggesting that all forces of nature occur in pairs, as surely as a pendulum swings from one side to the other. The swing may follow a schedule so sluggish as to make it impossible for us to see, and its stroke may wobble. But the return will come; action will bring reaction.

This natural order of things does not bode well just now for those in the path of Hurricane Florence. Up to 40 inches of rain are likely to fall over several days in many places, as a wall of water up to 11 feet high surges far up inland waterways. High tides come and go on roughly 12-hour cycles, as regular as a pendulum; this storm surge could span eight tide cycles.

This means that the usual flow of water back toward the ocean will be met with a surge coming in. There will be nowhere for the water to go but up, rising above the rooftops of single-story homes. High water may linger for days, or even weeks. When the water eventually recedes, as it will, it will surely leave behind a putrefying mess that could leave neighborhoods uninhabitable for a very long time. Places will change, and people with them.

Yet the water will go. People will rebuild, maybe even with a renewed recognition of nature's preeminence and a respect for what science teaches us it will do.

So it goes in politics, most visibly in democracies. It's easiest to see in the United States in the fact that two-term presidencies are rarely followed by a president of the same party. So eight years of Eisenhower (Republican) yielded to eight years of Kennedy and Johnson (Democrat), which yielded to eight years of Nixon and Ford (Republican). There are one-term presidencies and exceptions to the two-term rule - Ronald Reagan got a third term, in effect, for his vice president, George H.W. Bush - but American politics usually turns back on itself: Clinton yields to Bush, who yields to Obama, who yields to Trump. And so it goes.

Sometimes political cycles are disrupted by the political equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane. You may argue we are living through just that right now in the tweet-soaked, insult-fueled, whopper-wailing administration of Donald J. Trump.

Love him or hate him, you must concede that he is the most radical president we've seen in a long time, or perhaps ever. It's unsurprising that Democrats don't like him, but true conservatives are wide-eyed, too: His embrace of trillion-dollar annual deficits flies in the face of generations of Republican orthodoxy, and his intentional disruption of international trade is horrifying to the business interests that usually love Republican leaders. His attacks on our federal law enforcement and national security agencies are unprecedented.

Many of his supporters welcome the disruption Trump brings to a political system that they think hasn't served them. They're happy that the economy is thriving, and don't much mind (or notice) that it's being financed by public debt that will leave their grandchildren without money to repair roads and bridges and honor the promises of Social Security and Medicare.

Even in the midst of the storm churn of Trump's 600-plus days in office, though, there are signs that the waters of Trumpism may be starting to recede.

As Democrats post big turnout numbers in primaries around the country, polls show their voters to be more enthusiastic about voting this year than Republicans. The same polls also show a likelihood that Republicans will lose control of the House and perhaps even the Senate - an odd outcome, given the economy's performance. What seems to be turning off the independent and moderate voters each party craves to win, experts note, is Donald Trump himself.

Yet even as the impact of Hurricane Florence will remain long after its winds have died down, we will endure a long clean-up of the political swamp that now engulfs us. We'll be left divided more bitterly than any time since the Civil War, disillusioned about the possibility of progress through politics, our trust in institutions vital to our democracy left in tatters. It may be a generation before the reaction to some of the actions of these days restores equilibrium. It will come, but we will wait long for these putrid waters to recede.

Rex Smith is editor of the Times Union. Contact him at rsmith@timesunion.com.