Stop asking sane people to lovingly accept those who cheered on a man who has done grave and permanent damage to this world. It’s outrageous that half the country should be asked to exhibit mercy while the other half is permitted to wallow in its criminality and ignorance. […] Americans have a sliver of a chance to demonstrate that there is some conscience left among us by requiring those who did harm to apologize, and if they do not, to be denied any further role in public life. And obviously, it’s incredible that this needs to be said, but those who are guilty of crimes must be prosecuted (just for a change!) The absence of accountability means condoning wrongdoing, as a glance at cable TV news, with its parade of war criminal guests, can show you. Demanding accountability is what being ‘reasonable’ requires of us. Being ‘empathetic’ means empathy for those who’ve been harmed, before we begin even to think of empathizing with those who’ve done harm. It’s an insult to every family broken by ICE, an insult to George Floyd, to ask that Trump voters be forgiven in the absence of a total and credible apology from them, and a repudiation of all the wrong they’ve done.

Many of the worst things the president has said and done were said and done by his predecessors. --- For as much as it seems that Donald Trump has changed something about the character of this country, the truth is he hasn’t. What is terrible about Trump is also terrible about the United States. Everything we’ve seen in the last four years — the nativism, the racism, the corruption, the wanton exploitation of the weak and unconcealed contempt for the vulnerable — is as much a part of the American story as our highest ideals and aspirations. The line to Trump runs through the whole of American history, from the white man’s democracy of Andrew Jackson to the populist racism of George Wallace, from native expropriation to Chinese exclusion. And to the extent that Americans feel a sense of loss about the Trump era, they should be grateful, because it means they’ve given up their illusions about what this country is, and what it is (and has been) capable of. There is very little about Donald Trump or his policies that doesn’t have a direct antecedent in the American past. Despite what Joe Biden might say about its supposedly singular nature (“The way he deals with people based on the color of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening”), the president’s racism harkens right back to the first decades of the 20th century, when white supremacy was ascendant and the nation’s political elites, including presidents like Woodrow Wilson, were preoccupied with segregation and exclusion for the sake of preserving an “Anglo-Saxon” nation.

The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken. --- When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category. The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message. Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos. […] The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s. […] Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end. Read: It pays to be rich during a pandemic This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future. […] It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods—only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat. The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning. We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

Media-bashing robocalls, chloroquine Twitter trolls, briefing-room propaganda—how the president and his allies are trying to convince America he was right all along. --- As reality continues to assert itself in the coming months—whether in the form of rising death tolls, or clinical drug trials, or shifting White House policy—Trump’s information warriors will likely retreat from some of their current positions. (They may also notch a few “wins” as the facts catch up to their narratives.) In the meantime, they are staying cautiously on message.

Ehhhh we’ll see. As Democrats fret about their own prospects, many fail to recognize the president’s fundamental weakness.

The impeachment trial didn’t change any minds. Here’s why. --- The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the information it needs to make enlightened political choices. If you short-circuit that process by saturating the ecosystem with misinformation and overwhelm the media’s ability to mediate, then you can disrupt the democratic process. What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age. And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable. […] Trump can dictate an entire news cycle with a few unhinged tweets or an absurd press conference. The media cycle is easily commandeered by misinformation, innuendo, and outrageous content. These are problems because of the norms that govern journalism and because the political economy of media makes it very hard to ignore or dispel bullshit stories. This is at the root of our nihilism problem, and a solution is nowhere in sight.

Political reporters were taken aback by Hillary Clinton’s charge that half of Trump’s supporters are prejudiced. Few bothered to investigate the claim itself. --- Indeed, what Breitbart understood, what his spiritual heir Donald Trump has banked on, what Hillary Clinton’s recent pillorying has clarified, is that white grievance, no matter how ill-founded, can never be humiliating nor disqualifying. On the contrary, it is a right to be respected at every level of American society from the beer-hall to the penthouse to the newsroom. […] It is easy enough to look into Clinton’s claim and verify it or falsify it. The numbers are all around us. And the story need not end there. A curious journalist might ask what those numbers mean, or even push further, and ask what it means that the ranks of the Democratic Party are not totally free of their own deplorables. […] For much of this campaign journalists have attacked Hillary Clinton for being evasive and avoiding hard questioning from their ranks. And then the second Clinton is forthright and says something revealing, she is attacked—not for the substance of what she’s said—but simply for having said it. This hypocrisy carries a chilling implicit message: Lie to me. Lie to the country. Lie to everyone. This weekend was not just another misanalysis, it was a shocking betrayal of the journalistic mission which should urge the revelation of truth as opposed to the propagation of hot takes, Washington jargon, and politics-speak. The shame reflects an ugly and lethal trend in this country’s history—an ever-present impulse to ignore and minimize racism, an aversion to calling it by its name.

Trump, a man who has repeatedly said that he only responds to consequences, has faced none. His lies meet with no institutional resistance. Quite the contrary. His decision to say outrageous, incorrect, inflammatory things has paid off handsomely: His supporters believe them, and those in power will not acknowledge that he has said anything at all. The combined effect has rendered him immune to every standard we, as a country, once shared. […] The word hypocrisy bobs up in these discussions, but the issue—as many have pointed out—is not hypocrisy, because those who are failing us do not aspire to intellectual or moral consistency in the first place. There is no negotiating with, or appeasing, or even engaging a party that feels no responsibility to the truth. Lying is more than “uncivil.” It corrodes relationships and trust, and the damage it does it permanent. I know it’s fashionable these days to wear one’s cynicism on one’s sleeve: We predict every promise will be broken because expecting honesty is laughably naïve. This makes reality easier to live with and joke about. But it’s a symptom of national rot. Being lied to, constantly, is not the price of being governed. That we have naturalized this—that we expect nothing less, in fact—shows how far we’ve already gone down a bad, bad road. This was already an unhealthy country in many ways. But at least lies were still resented. Now they are celebrated. […] The good-faith ideological battle some thought right and left were waging turned out to be no such thing: Modern conservatism was never about small government. Or personal liberty—for women and people of color, anyway. It wasn’t about fiscal responsibility: The GOP passed a tax plan that has blown up our national debt, which is projected to reach 78 percent of America’s GDP by the end of this year, the highest it’s been since 1950. And Republicans are still not happy. They will pretend that this crisis they created will require “sacrifices,” gutting services poor Americans desperately need, like health care. The poor and disadvantaged will die. Meanwhile, those in power will celebrate how much they deserve their wealth and how little anyone else deserves. And they will grab for more. You’d think they’d be happy: America now has the highest income inequality in the industrialized world. But even that is not enough. The greed is insatiable. And it is a greed not just for wealth but for domination—for permanent entitlement. What they want is to be served. At restaurants. On golf courses. In corporate offices. There is no form of protest they will respect: loud or silent, formal or spontaneous, civil or rude. Written petitions or marches on the streets. They don’t care. Those in power have been very clear about what they do care about. “We have more money and more brains and better houses and apartments and nicer boats,” Trump said Wednesday in a speech to his supporters, because he cannot help but say what he really means. “We are the elite.”

Cruelty has always been part of American policymaking. Sometimes it’s a corollary effect—somebody, somewhere, is doing something we don’t want them to be doing, and if we have to kill some people or destroy a few lives to make them stop, that’s just the price. But in recent years, there’s been a shift in how we approach immigration and the border. It’s a tired cliché by now, but that doesn’t make it any less true: the cruelty is the point. […] There’s no reason to tread lightly here—and why would we want to? This is a profoundly monstrous policy, designed by deeply broken people, which revels in the suffering and degradation of other human beings purely in service of crude racism. There’s no justifying it, not if compassion and decency are even tangential elements of how you experience the world. […] If civility means politely inoculating powerful people from even the mildest forms of accountability for their ugly decisions, who exactly does that kindness serve, and what’s the point of it? Ellen’s monologue was an example of what’s fast becoming a genre of finger-wagging sanctimony in America, deployed to discipline us into performing deference to power and training us into a caustic meekness. Vote, but don’t boo the President at a baseball game. Wave a sign, but don’t confront someone in a restaurant, even if their day job is tearing families apart. And of course, don’t make an unrepentant war criminal uncomfortable at a football game. There’s an unspoken ranking of value that the gatekeepers of civility are making when they serve us these lectures. The comfort of the VIPs they rub elbows with at gated cocktail parties and luxury boxes is explicitly more important than the lives of Iraqis or Central American asylum-seekers at our border. If we want to live in a “decent” society, we are told, we have to treat those who make us complicit in horror with genteel respect. […] The problem with America’s national character is not that we’re too rude to our leaders, it’s that we’re too deferential to them. Consider the vector of incivility both Ellen and Obama blamed for the bile-soaked discourse in American politics. Was it a catastrophic war whose aftershocks will long outlast every living being on this planet, or the mask-off cruelties being inflicted upon vulnerable people at the border? Nope. For two of the most successful Americans alive, both of whom built their brands on the mantle of activism, the source of our descent into disharmony is apparently mean tweets. It’s enough to make you wonder whether the two of them think that the protestors in Santiago, Hong Kong, Cairo and Baghdad are also being ‘unkind.’ […] These are not mundane disagreements we are having in America. They are about whether we can continue to institutionalize brutality. Calm down, we are being told. Try to change things if you want, so long as you don’t make anybody in charge feel uncomfortable or isolated. With all due respect, fuck that.

His politics, to the extent that they’ve ever been legible, have always been off-the-rack big city tabloid bullshit—crudely racist exterminate the brutes/back the blue authoritarianism in the background and ruthless petty rich person squabbling in the front. His actions since becoming president have been those of a dim, cruel child playacting at being a powerful man—giving orders without quite knowing what they mean or how they might be carried out, taunting enemies, beating up the people he can afford to beat up without having to be called to account for it, lying as needed or just for yuks. He hasn’t changed a thing since graduating from punchline to president. It’s been clear for decades that Trump was both an asshole and a dummy; this is now a problem not just for the odd unlucky cocktail waitress and his staff of cheesy apparatchiks but for literally every person on earth.

Functioning societies depend on shared, socially-mediated sources of knowledge. It's the glue that holds societies together. Conspiracy theories ask us to give up more & more of our trust in each other, and in our knowledge-generating mechanisms. Conspiracy theories come at a cost. They ask us to give up on our trust in knowledge, in knowledge-producing institutions, and in each other. And so ultimately, they ask us to give up on the fabric of society altogether.

By making fun of professors who spoke in language that most people considered incomprehensible (“The Lesbian Phallus”), wealthy Ivy League graduates could pose as anti-elite. By mocking courses on writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, they made a racial appeal to white people who felt as if they were losing their country. As the 1990s wore on, because multiculturalism was associated with globalisation – the force that was taking away so many jobs traditionally held by white working-class people – attacking it allowed conservatives to displace responsibility for the hardship that many of their constituents were facing. It was not the slashing of social services, lowered taxes, union busting or outsourcing that was the cause of their problems. It was those foreign “others”.