I’ve got a new piece in Harper’s, taking stock of a very American pathology—amnesia—which I analyze with the help of Philip Roth, Barbara Fields, Louis Hartz, and Alchoholics Anonymous. The piece is behind a paywall, but here’s a taste: Ever since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve been warned against normalizing Trump. That fear of normalization misstates the problem, though. It’s never the immediate present, no matter how bad, that gets normalized—it’s the not-so-distant past. Because judgments of the American experiment obey a strict economy, in which every critique demands an outlay of creed and every censure of the present is paid for with a rehabilitation of the past, any rejection of the now requires a normalization of the then. We all […]