Trumpism
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State of the Race 6
It looks like Democrats are going to vote their fears rather than their hopes, for the past rather than for the future, for Joe Biden rather than for Bernie Sanders. It's understandable if not particularly admirable. But I should be old enough to understand that expecting to find something to admire in the average liberal
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Rule of Law vs. Law and Order
Authoritarian nations come in many different stripes, but they all share a fundamental characteristic: The people who live in them are not allowed to freely choose their own leaders. This is why Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, in his speech announcing his vote to convict on the first article of impeachment, said that “corrupting
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Quote of the Day: Ross Douthat
Trump’s authoritarian tendencies are naked on his Twitter feed, but Bloomberg’s imperial instincts, his indifference to limits on his power, are a conspicuous feature of his career. Trump jokes about running for a third term; Bloomberg actually managed it, bulldozing through the necessary legal changes. Trump tries to bully the F.B.I. and undermine civil liberties;
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State of the Race 1
Bernie Sanders' position in this cycle is a lot like Trump's in the last one. He has a solid, impassioned base of support that is dwarfed by the majority which is split among the rest of the field. Trump won because the opposition to him could not unify around another candidate to oppose him. This
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Hannah Arendt on Why Political Lying Works
I thought after this historically depressing week, this post about Hannah Arendt that I wrote in December 2016 right after the Trump election resonates.
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Dolly Parton and the Coincidentia Oppositorum
There’s a mesmerizing and ironic artifice to Dolly Parton—a sincere and relatable duality. She’s one of those icons in whom seemingly opposing forces naturally connect: poverty and folksiness against the power of enormous success, vulnerability and tenderness against effervescent self-assuredness, a story of honesty and heartache under an image so artfully plastic it seems to
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McConnell’s Calculation
It would seem that McConnell feels a need to disguise the fact that the Senate impeachment trial is a sham and a cover up. Americans expect a fair trial. Assuming most Americans have retained at least some shred of sanity, McConnell's obvious cover up would lead them to vote out Trump and the senators who
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Nunes/Bannon Mind Rebuttal, Part I
In the previous post, I tried to lay out the mindset that animates what might be called Bannonism, which is really a form of white nationalist revanchism. Its roots lie in Jacksonian populism that was until the 1960s one of the primary constituencies, especially in the south, along with the white ethnic blue collar workers