A novel makes it possible to understand not just events, but the people who control the events; not only their choices, but also their motives.
The elite isn’t leading anymore. It’s trapped.
Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained.
If right and left are competing to be the biggest victim, who is competing to be the government?
Journalism can go right up to the door of the room in which the decisions are made. A novel can go inside the room – and inside the character’s heads.
Look, the media are trapped by changes in the technology and business of their industry.
Maybe it’s true that people with less extreme views who are also interested in public affairs have been driven out by a marketplace that doesn’t offer them anything of the tone they want to listen to.
Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.
The main benefit of controlling a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.
The Republican Party was built on a coalition of the nation’s biggest winners from globalization and its biggest losers.
Democracy is a work in progress. So is democracy’s undoing.
Trump is the producer, writer, and star of an extravaganza performance of the theater of resentment.
The one-third of America that identifies as “conservative” will be isolated even more profoundly within an information ghetto of deception and incitement.
The Republican Party was built on a coalition of the nation’s biggest winners from globalization and its biggest losers. The winners wrote the policy; the losers provided the votes.
Power creates temptations, and that is true even for the smallest increments of power: the power of the building inspector, of the customs official, of the cop at the traffic stop. It took a lot of work by a lot of people over a long time to build even America’s highly imperfect standards of public integrity. Undoing that work would be a far easier task. Corruption is the resting state of pubic affairs; integrity a painstaking, unceasing struggle against cultural inertia and political gravity.
No president in history has burned more public money to sustain his personal lifestyle than Donald Trump. Three-quarters of the way through his first year in office, President Trump was on track to spend more on travel in one year of his presidency than Barack Obama in eight – even though Trump only rarely ventured west of the Mississippi or across any ocean.
When we talk about online radicalization we always talk about Muslims. But the radicalization of white men online is at astronomical levels,” tweeted the sharp social observer Siyanda Mohutsiwa the morning after the 2016 election.
The financial and economic consequences of the stoppage of payments by the largest purchaser of goods and services on planet Earth could not be calculated, could barely even be imagined. It would be a nuclear event – and Republican Party leaders were willing to threaten it not only once, but a second time again in 2013.
Perhaps the very darkness of the Trump experience can summon the nation to its senses and jolt Americans to a new politics of commonality, a new politics in which the Trump experience is remembered as the end of something bad, and not the beginning of something worse.
And then humbly consider this second troubling question: If the Trump administration were as convinced as you are that you would do the right thing – would they have asked you in the first place?
Embedded in Trumpism is the distinction between “people” and “the people.” Not all people belong to “the people.” More and more people emphatically do not belong – which is why Trump’s absurd claims about illegal voting resonated so powerfully.