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Thinking about the GWOT and especially Iraq War as point of departure for our present crisis. Some causes go deeper, as they always do. But 9/11 was a turning point. @attackerman's has a must-read forthcoming book on this.
Elite failure, in itself, is nothing new. But if you needed encouragement to distrust our institutional setup, the 9/11 aftermath provided some very good reasons.
Trump is a mad king and I will be relieved when he leaves office.
But you can see why the sacrifice of tens thousands of Americans lives (100s of thousands or millions of others, depending how you count) and trillions of dollars *for nothing* might lead some people to counter respectable madness with their own brand.
You could tell a similar story about the financial crisis or, more recently, COVID.
All of which is to say: I don't think the election was stolen and I'm sickened by the attempts to overturn that culminated in yesterday's farce. But I do understand why a lot of Americans simply don't trust institutions or the people who run them.
