by Paul Henninger

The recent violent turn taken by American voters in support of an opposition to Donald Trump has highlighted the unhinged element at the core of the Trump campaign. This violence puts a disturbing edge on a campaign that had already made an uneasy transition from an oddity to a full-blown movement. And while clearly the worst thing about the turn toward physical violence is that it confirms the fears of those that saw Trump as a dangerous, race-bating demagogue, perhaps the thing that we most lose with each punch that’s thrown is a little less obvious.

Because one of the best ways to explain the fervent support for a candidacy distinctly short on level-headed thinking is a strange quirk of the American psyche at the heart of many of our successes: recklessness.

The origin and successful rise of the United State is above all NOT rooted in careful planning. The reasonable crowd were very much not the ones that climbed aboard a bunch of rickety boats to head over to the New World to begin with. And once there, it took a special subset of an already slightly unhinged group of people to keep pushing, against any reasonable risk assessment, westward into the wild and dangerous frontier of the American wilds. Of course despite many human causalities, this bet very much paid off.

So too is recklessness at the heart of American economic success over the last century. According to a report by Compass, 6 of the top 10 cities for startup activity are in the United States. And while the USA has no monopoly on innovation, many of the great technology and financial innovations over the last 100 years came as a result of the blind faith exhibited by entrepreneurs as well as the appetite of American companies and consumers for new things. Say what you will about the rate at which the United States consumes new phones, televisions and TV shows, but

American consumption is another example of an almost pathological embrace of the new. Of course as evidenced by the 2008 financial collapse, the first couple of dot com bubbles and the more recent wobbling of the latest tech bubble, American economic recklessness can from time to time end in some pretty serious tears. But on balance that recklessness has been an important part of the engine of American economic growth.

Recklessness too can explain at least a part of the popularity of the Trump campaign. Surely there is a core of Trump supporters who can be characterized in one way or another as a permutation of the far right movement enjoying new popularity around the world. The Alternative for Germany party, a far right party founded in 2013 that taps into some of the same anti-migrant fervor that fuels at least some of Trump’s support, gained 13%, 15% and 24% of the vote in three recent state-level elections and many far right movements from Denmark to here in the UK have found moments of popularity recently born out of a rising level of economic and cultural frustration and change. But how to explain the additional 20% of popularity that Trump enjoys among the US electorate? In many ways practically all of the other republican candidates have more reliably right-wing political positions.

Perhaps that additional popularity is another manifestation of that uniquely American recklessness that has driven so much change over the course of American history. It’s hard to argue that Trump’s positions represent a carefully considered plan to do just about anything. But it’s easy to see how someone who wanted change, was frustrated with ineffective, uninspiring establishment politicians could decide to take a flier on someone who might seem a little crazy but who’s campaign boils down in many ways to a guy shouting “I’m sick of this! Aren’t you?! Follow me!” American recklessness has gotten the country as a whole, many individuals, and the countries and populations that have to live with the consequences of our decisions into a fair amount of trouble historically. And it’s not hard to imagine many of Trump’s positions and proclamations ending very, very badly if he’s given the chance to implement some practical, political version of them. But this wouldn’t be the first time that a bunch of people living in the United States, newly arrived or otherwise, got together and when confronted by evidence of a problem or opportunity threw themselves after a poorly planned solution on the basis that it had at least a chance to make things better.

Perhaps with that in mind it would be important to keep in mind another key element of successful recklessness-based efforts of the past. What the Israelis call “planning in motion” and what internet entrepreneurs like to call the Pivot is a sometimes clever way of acknowledging that the direction we charge in at the very beginning of new idea isn’t always the right one, or even a very good one. Planning in motion is openness to the possibility that only a part of an initial strategy might be worth salvaging and a willingness to work very, very hard to reinvent and renew from the parts of an idea that actually showed promise.

As the reckless American electorate crashes the halls of the Republican convention in Cleveland later this year, planning in motion might be a better principal than the Stop Trump knee jerk. Surely propping up an establishment American politician isn’t the thing worth salvaging from increasingly inevitable wreckage of the Trump experience. Recklessness has handed us some breathtaking innovations and political triumphs over the years and while Trump 1.0 as a strategy seems like a pretty bad idea, that doesn’t mean that this new reckless impulse is anything close to a write off.