One hundred and fifty years after the emergence of the Confederate Lost Cause ideology, a new Lost Cause invaded the U.S. Capitol with the incitement of the president of the United States. Waving American, Confederate, Gadsden and, especially, Trump flags, Donald Trump’s loyalists desecrated the greatest symbolic edifice of America. […] Read more »
The American Abyss
… Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to […] Read more »
Republicans Confront the Consequences of Their Doomsday Rhetoric
The Republican Party’s “Flight 93” revolution tragically, but almost inevitably, came full circle this week in a storm of insurrectionary violence at the U.S. Capitol. Late in the 2016 presidential campaign, an anonymous author, eventually revealed as Michael Anton, a conservative scholar who later joined the Trump White House, described […] Read more »
Trump Helped Take Extremist Views From The Fringes Of Society To A Mob Attacking The Capitol
Faith in the integrity of the presidential election has been concerningly low for months — in large part because of President Trump’s repeated false claims that the election was stolen from him. And on Wednesday, we saw an extreme example of the consequences of that mistrust when pro-Trump extremists briefly […] Read more »
Georgia, the mob, and Mississippi
The picture of the horrific mob that attacked the United States Capitol – encouraged by the President of the United States – will be the indelible after image of his presidency. There is irony in mob violence the same week in which the Democrats won the Senate and Georgia elected […] Read more »
‘This is not who we are’: Actually, the Capitol riot was quintessentially American
… There’s no disputing that the assault was remarkable. But “un-American” is the wrong adjective. A better way to make sense of the news of the past few days — not only the violent occupation in Washington but also the historic Senate victories by Democrats in Georgia — is as […] Read more »