It would be great if we got an admission of culpability from the people who have been firing from the hip and selling it as thoughtful policy (or punditry) since January, but I don't think we'll get it on a timeline that matters for near-term politics. https://twitter.com/Comparativist/status/1261243583517999104 …
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What we've seen instead is the same sort of retcon that came years after Vietnam and Iraq. The fashionable progressive establishment rewrites itself into the right side of history and memoryholes any alternative narrative.https://twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1243983185215664128 …
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Fast-forward to 2030: instead of "Trump the incompetent buffoon who failed to close early enough" we'll hear about "Trump the scared over-reactionary who locked us down to a depression". Never mind that the first critique is closer to the truth, it has limited scapegoating value.
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Recall how in common cultural parlance Nixon and Kissinger are coded as the bloodthirsty accelerators of the Vietnam war, while Kennedy is remembered fondly for a moon landing that happened on Nixon's watch. It wouldn't be the first time.
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That's not to excuse Trump's rank incompetence. He's culpable for that incompetence, and if he had a shred of dignity he would have resigned over far lesser blunders. This unfitness makes him an excellent sin-eater for the administrative state's far more consequential failures.
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The immune system of the state and civil society has kicked into high gear, but not against coronavirus. They're furiously dispatching narrative antibodies to maintain the epistemic model that underpins our system of government. They're wreaking the body politic in the process.
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Much like a covid patient suffering from a cytokine storm, the Anglophone body politic is under attack from both external actors and its own defense mechanisms. We've reached the point of sepsis and organ failure, and yet the twin attackers push on relentlessly.
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Unfortunate intersection with the mistakes made by computer programmers, who spend a lot of time in a world where the right magic words really do suffice to solve problems.
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The press is not the problem.
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Demagogues are the problem.
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