While the backstory in the United States is quite different, the underlying political dynamics at play today are strikingly similar. Faced with a broad revolt against the common-sense liberal worldview, panicked American elites are prophesying an apocalyptic, totalitarian future for the Republic. And when it comes to “doing politics,” liberals seem keen to double down on what worked in the past.
I have noticed that a kind of sickly grey hope hangs around most people’s hottest anti-Trump vitriol, lingering like stale morning breath: a hope that once everything is sorted—all the disinformation exposed, all the dossiers verified, all the tax returns audited, and all the President’s men jailed—the “adults” will wrest back control of politics, and things can get back more or less to the way they were before.
Well, the old regime was pretty good for them. For others, not so much.