This blog has been offline for a while, mostly due to technical issues that I think have now been fixed. (Much thanks to Pea Lutz, whose work on the blog has been excellent; if you’re looking for someone to do such work, I highly recommend Pea.) My apologies for the extended silence. I had been posting a lot on Facebook, so much of my commentary on politics and other matters is there. But I’m going to try to return to being more active here. One fascinating phenomenon that I’ve been noticing in the last couple of weeks is how, despite Trump’s winning the election, a fair amount of both reporting and commentary in the media, including on the left, has […]
I’ve noticed an interesting evolution—perhaps devolution—in the “Trump is a tyrant” line of argument. Originally, the claim was robust and ambitious: Trump was like the classic fascist rulers of the twentieth century, readying to lead not only a repressive and violent state apparatus, under the unified control of his party, but also a street-based mass movement that channeled a broad and scary consensus of the majority of the nation. It soon became apparent that despite his electoral victory, Trump in fact had very little ability to control popular opinion. Not only has he had the worst approval ratings of any president at this point in his term, but he’s also been singularly incapable of moving the needle of public opinion toward his positions. As […]