Astonishing.

I had hoped we could find an easier way. But it looks like we’re going to have to do it the hard way.

There is so much to say, but I’ll keep this short. We need more perspective. But it does appear that we are more advanced in our collective insanity than I had thought and hoped.

Yesterday I wrote about Gary Gerstle’s idea that we are at the end of the Neoliberal Order, and so therefore at the beginning of something new. I doubt Trump represents that, although the Project 2025 Trump faction has ambitions along those lines. But as I said, should Trump be elected, he will be surrounded by infighting cranks and crooks, and all we should expect from such a scene is disorder and chaos.

So if there is anything I can think of to strike an optimistic note, it’s that perhaps out of the chaos something better can be born. France is on what—its fifth republic now? Each new French republic came after a shock. So perhaps we Americans need to found a second republic, and that just can’t be done until the current one is utterly delegitimated, which it looks like it will be.

We’ll see. But there’s good reason to believe that we as a people on both sides of the political divide need to be shaken out of our respective dogmatic slumbers, awakened from our collective screen trance, and liberated from the bubbles that seal us off from the Deep Real.

So maybe we need a second and even stronger dose of Trump shock therapy because clearly the first one wasn’t enough.