Trump is wrong: America is not in decline
Conor Friedersdorf
... After listening in Cleveland to dire portraits of an America made terrifying by immigrants, my personal reality check could not have been more stark. My plane touched down at LAX and I promptly hopped in a cab with a friendly Muslim man who drove me home. Then I lit out for my favorite Mexican taco truck. The next morning, I chatted at a Venice coffee shop with these fellow patrons: a Salvadoran immigrant from a Catholic family, a woman who converted to Judaism and a Buddhist. The next day I patronized businesses owned by people of Korean, Thai and Italian heritage. What would sound, in a former era, like the setup to an ethnic joke is now routine in Southern California.
“I'm just your average Mexican American Jewish Italian,” L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti said at the Democratic National Convention. “America works best when every strand is woven into our national fabric” ...
L.A. is proof that we can all, more or less, get along. The city’s thriving relative not just to earlier incarnations of itself, but to most places around the country, past and present. To live here is to see that for all the problems we have to solve, Trump is badly out of touch. You can bet he’ll lose Los Angeles by a historic margin.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-friedersdorf-trump-decline-thesis-20160803-snap-story.html
