11 Comments

I'm no fan of Woodrow Wilson. But he had no aspiration to create a personal and heritable dictatorship (aka an absolute monarchy), as Trump clearly does, and as the majority of the Republican party would support, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The US is in more peril than at any time since the Civil War.

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So you seem to be 1. resigned to a 2024 Trump win and 2. Somehow optimistic that all will nevertheless be ok because....what?

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My high school history class (Langley High School in McLean Va, class of 83) didn’t get past Reconstruction.

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Philip Roth's "the indigenous American berserk" was a perfectly good phrase in 2016 and remains so now.

Part of having recovered from that moment was going to the opposite extreme as far as electing presidents who disavowed all of Wilson's ambitions and giving the country and the Democratic Party time to remember Wilson's actual accomplishments.

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In terms of optimism, I feel really, really good about Twitter being a dirty brand. I think a lot of people didn't realize that everything that they dislike about Twitter now was in a way always true in terms of having a centralized platform for marketing, crowning thought leaders, and everything else that's part of reactionary centrism (which is sort of definable as the enemy common people have to do the 'we go high' Zen master path with).

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