I'm that age, & can sorta guess. With the breakup of the USSR we shifted from thinking of it as the Big Bad to cheerleading for the new non-commie republics that took its place, albeit with worries about stability, loose nukes, etc. By 2012, when Romney, in a debate, called... 1/
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Russia our #1 adversary, I think most of us chuckled right along with Obama, like WHAT? We’d spent the last decade being scared shitless of Middle Eastern jihadists; Russia wasn’t even on the radar. We knew Putin was a thug, but he wasn’t our problem as far as we knew. 2/
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Meanwhile, a big bunch of us, distressed at the pace of social and demographic change here, were feeling less enthused about democracy since democracy wasn’t producing sufficiently conservative results. Putin-style oligarchic authoritarianism didn’t look so bad, they thought, 3/
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maybe we could use a little of that here. And so, Boom. MAGA. That Putin helped get their guy elected might have been concerning, but hey, it worked out, right? So at best I think a lot of them are conflicted—they might dislike being pwned by a foreign power, but they love... 4/
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how that pwnage empowered their ideology. And while Russia retains much of the USSR's nuclear threat, I think it's seen as a different country. If it were still communist? Whole 'nother story. What was drummed into us as kids was not so much “Russia bad” as “communism bad.” 5/5
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But authoritarian and kleptocracy is totally ok? That flies in the face of everything we have fought for.
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Indeed. But that's the moment we're living in now. "If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy." (D. Frum) And a lot of these guys have been authoritarians from the get-go. Back during ...
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Vietnam, the "love it or leave it" crowd didn't know what we were fighting for any more than we on the antiwar side did. It literally didn't matter. They would parrot the party line about freedom and such, but it was really about submission to authority, citizenship=obedience.
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The median age....
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Actually... if 64 were the mean, half would be older.
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Two separate statements. The average age is 64. And roughly half are older than that.
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You seem to presume they would have the nation:s interest in mind. Remove that assumption and rerun the program
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Not presuming anything other than they do their job.
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Are you confusing average with median?
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No. The average age is 64. I should have said "roughly half" are older than that, but tend to simplify things on Twitter because of character limits. Did not mean to imply that 64 is the median, but I see how it could be read that way.
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Paraphrasing George Carlin: “think of how old the average senator is. Then realize that half of them are even older!” George was funny, but not a statistician.

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Rule of Law. Democracy. Country over Party. Civic Engagement. Patriot. Still The Impossible Girl 

