Reminder: we’ve faced terrible things before. We’re stronger than we think. https://twitter.com/historylvrsclub/status/1178706821412016133 …
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Replying to @CaitlinPacific
Actually, we're not as strong as we think. Too many of us believe our country invulnerable, and its enemies negligible. Too many of us believe we can afford to hate and fear our own countrymen far more than the foreign despots who cheer and spur our internecine conflicts.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @CaitlinPacific
Too many of us suppose that we may with impunity place and maintain in positions of tremendous power and responsibility leaders we know to be incompetent, unsound, and venal. Like Romans in the days of Heliogabalus, we imagine our empire capable of surviving even lunatic rule.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @CaitlinPacific
This is perhaps the most astonishing thing about our present predicament. Too many of us seem willing to view the duties of citizenship whimsically -- indeed even ironically, as though to take them seriously were a mug's game. We imagine it doesn't much matter what we do, or why.
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @CaitlinPacific
How and why we've come to this pass seems of very little general interest. Very few of us even bother to ask, "Cui bono?" Tacitly we assume that some sort of law of nature has made us jaded, complacent, and fractious -- that (in Dickens' memorable phrase) it's "nobody's fault."
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And although it's idiotic to attribute our present predicament to some vast, shadowy conspiracy, it's equally obtuse to pretend that it all merely happened, wholly without human intervention or intent. More people need to read Barlett & Steele. And Packer. And Thucydides.
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