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I don’t tweet much any more, but I’ve posted a lot today. What sticks about this event is the sense of futility. It’s been years in the making. Something like it was inevitable, even obvious. But what could be done to prevent it?
The proposed remedies: sympathizing with Trump supporters, meeting them, speaking their moral language, shaming them, condemning them, warning about them - simply do not work.
It was always hypocritical, corralled to parts of the domestic polity, and part-mythological, but America did have a kind of default liberal anti-authoritarian thread running through its culture, especially its pop culture, after WW2.
It was constructed over decades to try and provide an immune system against something like Nazism. And three years of Boomers going on Facebook destroyed it almost completely.
Yes, Democrats have control of the institutions (barring the Supreme Court and important governorships). But they have little counter-weight to this kind of gray zone activity, where politics will increasingly take place.
The natural bipartisan territory is over stuff like infrastructure and health care. There are some levers there. But as we’ve seen with the pandemic, many millions of Americans are willing to kill themselves and others for what they believe in.
