1. My apologies to folks who follow me for defense and/or Africa stuff. This week--not to speak of the past 4 years--has been all about watching the political pathologies I've studied in OTHER countries or OTHER time periods blooming HERE and NOW. It's been overwhelming.

2. I am not a political scientist, despite my job title, I am a historian trained in social and intellectual history. Modern European and modern Jewish history, with "modern" roughly defined as 18th-century and up. Not American history.

3. And though I went to Yale I never studied with Paul Kennedy or Gaddis or those other guys who, in my condescending eyes, taught "current events." Or the American historians retelling tales of the Civil War and writing dissertations about cultural representations of cowboys.

4. I studied street revolutions. Riots. The emergence of modern politics. Barricades. And pogroms. Liberalism at war with illiberalisms of many flavors, on the streets or in the salons.

5. Many tellings of modern history are a generally 'happy' story, a teleology of progress notwithstanding evidence to the contrary such as the Holocaust. What would win in the end was the softer strain of Enlightenment values, i.e. Locke and Tocqueville.

6. It is a nice dream. Now all the optimism I can muster as I watch illiberalism blossom around me is that evoked by Candide in what was the first work of philosophy I ever read but turns out to be the only philosophy book anyone really needs to read.

7. What is optimism? Candide's companion asks, upon encountering a slave mutilated by his masters. Optimism, Candide explains, is the "madness of maintaining that everything is well when it is not."

8. Meanwhile, stay tuned for some good defense/Africa content as we return to our regularly scheduled programming.