Now, as the work of assembling Donald Trump's cabinet is in full swing, it is finally becoming clear that the strength of the American pendulum, from continuing its movement to the left extreme of liberalism and beginning its journey back to the right, determines the boundaries of the dialectic of American politics.
The United States is a great nation, and therefore desperately needs law and order.
It is no coincidence, for example, that Hollywood Westerns and gangster films have been woven around the conflict between law and nihilism. A family can only be raised on love, a small nation can be managed even with an eclectic set of laws, which are often not enforced, but a nation of 320 million people belongs to an entirely different breed of civilization.
""Law & Order," therefore, was, until recently at least, not only the name of a successful American television series, but also the second, hidden name of America.
I remember my son's first day in a middle-class American kindergarten, somewhere in the "rust belt" on the outskirts of Detroit, Michigan. The kindergarten floor was covered with square mats of different colors. Each mat had a child's name taped to it.
""From now until the end of the day, everyone will sit on their mat and not go beyond its boundaries," the kindergarten teacher explained to the children, "that's the rule.".
It was only a year before my son began reciting to me, in a perfect native accent, the ultimate American phrase - "It's against the law." He did it every time I parked, like an Israeli, close to the curb but against the direction of traffic.
But the US is also a supermarket, a giant shopping mall, whose primary reason for existence is marketing.
A good marketer needs a sales strategy - the US's is political correctness. The marketing logic behind political correctness is that if the ultimate goal is to sell something or someone to the person standing in front of you, it would be a grave mistake to emphasize the difference between them and you, and certainly not to insult them.
But the road from here to turning the national discourse artificial and interpersonal dialogue pale and lifeless is short.
From my years in the US, I remember long dinners that went on into the night, where the only topics of conversation were food, the weather, and nature walks, as any mention of a political or social position was considered a gross violation of etiquette.
Political correctness has penetrated American society so deeply that it has killed Americans as human beings who express their feelings and beliefs and reborn them as repressed and dull beings who find it difficult to mediate emotions.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that The Beatles called the album they released immediately after returning from a US tour "Rubber Soul". .
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And if this is indeed the US, what will those whose instincts are stronger than self-discipline do in such a society? Those who have difficulty with frameworks and laws? Those who suffer — like Trump, by the way, who dropped out of school when he was 13 — from disorders? And in particular, what will the lower white classes do who have been pushed down by anger and frustration at the exploitation they experience, which is inherent in a society of cutthroat capitalism, whose lifeblood is competition?
Where will they direct their insult that those they secretly consider inferior to them produced such a successful president from among them? Where will they direct their anger that those they see as sinners are more successful than them, if it is impossible to even express it verbally. .
Here and there, one of them takes a rifle and starts shooting at passersby. In the last election, they behaved properly and democratically.
They left their wooden houses in the suburbs of large industrial cities, in the small towns in the provincial areas between the two coasts, which in the US are contemptuously called the "flying zone", and voted for Trump in droves.
They voted for the man who expressed their anger, who knew how to create the impression that the law did not interest him, who tore down the curtain of political correctness for them, who declared that he was allowed not only to think and say that Muslims and Hispanics were inferior citizens and to treat them accordingly, but also to shoot someone in the street if he felt like it.
In that Rust Belt town on the outskirts of Detroit, I sometimes went to the local pub. The regulars were small farmers, workers in the dying auto industry, heavy equipment operators, highway workers.
""Red Necks," they called them. Leaning over their drinks along the bar, visors on their heads, they were always happy to see me enter - their unofficial advisor on financial and marital matters. "Here comes the Jew," they would raise their beer glass to me. Anti-Semites as usual, for better or worse.
They are the ones who have now stopped the pendulum of American politics from swinging to the left and given Trump the upper hand.
• Dr. Kimchi teaches at the School of Communication at Ariel University.
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