Nowadays, you ought to feel like Rip Van Winkle: If you had gone to sleep on Trump’s Inauguration Day and woke up today, you wouldn’t recognize your own America you see. What used to be a slow, boring continental drift in political affairs is now an avalanche every day.

Rip would be absolutely befuddled: He went to sleep knowing Democrats were liberal left and Trumpsters conservative right, as they had been his whole life. But, as he wakes up, he is shocked to see something he had never thought possible: Trumpsters, now in power, act more like raving leftist maniacs with chainsaws, feverishly destroying everything in sight and Democrats, now in opposition, act more like quaintly sentimental, out-of-date conservatives spouting off increasingly irrelevant “liberty and justice for all.”

The day Rip went to sleep we had the 47th president. Now, America has become a monarchy with a reigning king to whom the democratic Constitution is disposable. Trump was elected by the Constitution but, once in power, he wants to be free from it.

Since the French Revolution, history has described political positions in terms of “left” and “right.” Those who want change have been described as being left, and those who resist change as right. In the Old World of tradition and history, naturally balanced systems have held, whereas in America, a nation born of a bloody revolution, we tend to have a more distinctively polarized political division between left and right. But, today in Rip’s America, we are not sure who is left and who is right.

Ever since Thomas Jefferson challenged George Washington with a more progressive political party, we have had the two parties pushing their left and right political agenda. In our own lifetime, we have had Democrats and Republicans to represent these two respective political positions.

Many issues of politics — abortion, immigration, foreign trade, minorities, citizenship, civil liberties, justice, welfare and virtually anything that matters to citizens —are supported and opposed along the polarity. Trumpsters (formerly “Republicans”) often call liberals “commies” and “traitors” and liberals respond with “Nazis” and “fascists” for Trumspsters. As history has defined them, the left is characterized as daring, adventurous and innovative, and the right as stable, reliable and deliberate.

Now, shockingly, these liberal-leftist Democrats want to bring back the “good-olden-days” of the past very heavily ruled by capitalism, which is perhaps the most “conservative” of all institutions in any society. Yearning for the past when America was stable and predictable, Democrats now look more like traditional American conservatives. No wonder Rip is confused.

Trumpsters, previously on the conservative right as Republicans, are now busy changing America, tearing down the old established social-political-economic order that both the left and the right had built over many decades. Such radical tearing down of the status quo was always pushed by the leftist progressives, not by conservatives.

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In such a breathtaking pace of change in America’s politics, in search of everything new, it’s hard to call these Trumpsters “conservative.” These hitherto conservatives are — now as chainsaw-yielding, bloodthirsty revolutionary radicals — changing the very nature and structure of existing government bureaucracies by firing everybody. In this picture of astounding change, Trumpsters are revolutionaries and Democrats are reactionaries who want to oppose the changes brought about by the revolutionaries.

These revolution-hungry Trumpsters are destroying everything old: They have replaced seasoned and technical “professionals” with hothead “amateurs” who see politics primarily with passion and zeal; they pooh-pooh higher-education, America’s holy grail for young careerists; they are kicking out all the comfortably situated generals and admirals from the military; they are disrupting the very economic stability by imposing high tariffs on America’s trading partners; and they are dismantling the iconic-elitist cultural agencies, such as the Kennedy Center and Smithsonian Institute, and the elite universities are next. It’s “everywhere all at once,” carried out by these uncouth zealots and radicals and Democrats can only watch them in shock and awe.

Most shockingly, these formerly conservative-Republican radicals are promising to distribute to American citizens the money “saved” by DOGE. It is something only socialists or communists, certainly on the radical left, would imagine doing, as they did with land redistribution in numerous revolutions. The world has not seen such a radical takeover since the French and Russian Revolutions. Trumpsters are burning down old America in whose ruins they will (presumably) build a new nation but not until everything old is swept away from America’s political past. These radical-leftist Trumpsters have only begun, and they have almost four years to wipe out Democrats’ Old America.

Just now, we can plainly see which party is for change and which party resists change, and which party looks to the future and which party to the past. At no other time in American history has the left-right distinction been clearer — except it’s not what Rip and his cohort had known and believed. No such mind-numbing destruction of the old order in history has ever been observed since the French guillotined thousands of aristocrats and Russians summarily executed multitudes by firing squads, including their old king and czar.

Trumpsters, formerly conservative Republicans, are now daring radicals feverishly pushing for a new nation, democratic or not, while Democrats, formerly FDR liberal reformers of social change, have become old-fashioned defenders of Old America where government services were reliable and money was safe. Now, Trumpsters are reformers and Democrats are defenders of the status quo.

Confounded, Rip wants to go back to his (this time eternal) slumber.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.