We are confused. We cannot decide whether this Trump’s new government is an evolutionary continuation of American politics (alternating between Republicans and Dems) or a revolutionary break from the past (as some call it, Trump’s “hostile takeover”).

A string of Trump’s Cabinet nominees seems to prove the latter: Nominees for some important Cabinet posts, such as Justice, Defense or Health and Human Services, are without relevant experience and are considered “unqualified.” In short, they are not “professionals” in the way we expect of government officials, with adequate professionalism in their backgrounds. They are a bunch of “amateurs” jumping with both feet into their jobs with little or no qualification.

Among them, consider Matt Gaetz for the DOJ (since withdrawn, but still serving as a “type” for our analysis). It was a daring amateur move by Trump in choosing a young radical firebrand with inadequate experience for the job, particularly in contrast with the current Attorney General Merrick Garland, who is so proper, he is almost invisible. If Garland can be identified with a classic definition of professionalism, Gaetz should be crowned as a perfect “amateur” in Trump’s image.

We in America, as in all advanced societies, have been under the care of professionals in medicine, law, accounting, hard sciences, and other specialized fields of technical expertise for over a century. As their technical functionality and influence, and our dependency on them, have steadily grown, we expect all high functions in society to be carried out by certified and qualified professionals. Naturally, their wholesale replacement by Trump’s amateurs has shaken the nation.

But, actually, replacing specialized professionals with untrained amateurs did occur once before in American history: When the new Republic destroyed the British king’s authority in the American colonies, it also replaced the established (professional) occupants of government jobs with a whole new group of amateurs with little knowledge or experience, but mostly with idealist zeal and passion (typical “amateurism”).

At the time of transition from old England to new America, all the top positions of government had been occupied by aristocrats who were born and raised and–with some classical learning and aristocratic upbringing–prepared to occupy top jobs in society by right. By the time these “professional” aristocrats reached adulthood, they had been well trained for the governing roles as hereditary aristocratic rulers and most ambitious aristocratic scions expected their careers in government appointments.

After the Revolution, the American government was now occupied by a whole bunch of “amateurs.” Neither George Washington, nor Thomas Jefferson, nor John Adams, nor any other prominent Founding Fathers, had any standardized training or education for the new governing system. They had been mostly farmers, craftsmen and free intellectuals in the classic definition of “amateurs.”

Once their nation became independent, they jumped into their new roles with only zeal and passion in their hearts. Unlike the British “professional” aristocrats with proper training and expectations, the new American amateurs were a creative bunch of radicals who wanted to establish a wholly new nation, the likes of which the world had never seen before.

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At the time, the American colonies were a hotbed of radicalism, and England was an old feudal kingdom with everything established in proper tradition, custom and decorum. The Revolution changed everything, especially the replacement of professional governance by radical amateurs who knew nothing about the technicalities of governing.

Today, Donald Trump is repeating this revolutionary history in America by replacing all the professional careerists with hothead amateurs. The Trumpsters—who largely pooh-pooh higher education, careerism and manners — want to be the Founding Fathers of a new nation. In their vision, a man could aspire to the White House from a log house: To hell with college degrees, or even basic etiquette, anybody can become U.S. attorney general and raise hell.

Historically, human evolution moves from haphazard amateurism to more scientifically ordered professionalism. Contradicting this natural order is so contrary to human habits that such moves occur only in revolutionary times, and rarely. Ours today is one such revolution, which makes sense only in historical perspective.

Up to the late 19th century, many of advanced human enterprises in science, archeology, arts, polar explorations and other open fields were carried out by amateurs who had no academic titles or monetary compensations, relying primarily on their intuition, passion and love of their dreams. Famous explorers like Roald Amundsen, Henry Stanley and David Livingstone or Ernest Shackleton, or independent American thinkers like Lysander Spooner (of Athol) and Henry George, mostly without college, were all amateurs.

As science and technology advanced, these fields of amateur adventures became more formally organized into professions and professional manners that have become familiar to us. Now structured into a strict set of curricula for training, certification and commercially paid practices, professions have replaced the great creative energies of amateurs and their adventures with highly institutionalized procedures and bureaucratized rules.

Today, if you are a professional practitioner in an established professional trade, such as a dentist, that means repetition and routine in your practices that bind your whole life and career path.

Two exceptions still remain stubbornly amateur: In the economics of money-making and the politics of power-mongering. Money-making is still dominated by free entrepreneurs (like Bezos, Gates, Musk), not by Nobel prize-winning economists, and politics is now taken over by revolutionary radicals (like Trump and his MAGA allies), not by Harvard political scientists.

Democrats lost out as they tried to bet on consumer capitalism’s minimal comfort for the masses and stable career professionalism for their bureaucratic overlords. Just like the Founders in 1776, American voters in 2024 chose Trump’s exciting but risky amateurism over Democrats’ familiar but stale and uninspiring professionalism. Good or ill, that’s how we made the bed on Nov. 5; and we must lie in it.

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