"It really is true that in certain eras you have to go round the whole circle of follies before coming back to reason." -Benjamin Constant, 1810

I wrote an Independence Day meditation not knowing just how appropriate it would be the day after the Brobdingnag Bad Bill:

If this bill passes the House, I hope it will be the Boomers last great act of political malfeasance in a string of many.

Return of the neocon Republican Party the last few months is remarkable: war-making, tax-ctting, debt-ballooning, executive-championing, environment-destroying. Back to Bush2. Only diff Trump has made is to destroy veneer of ‘compassion’ and ‘human rights’ that Bush-Cheney had.

"A despot readily pardons the governed for not loving him, provided that they do not love each other." -Tocqueville

https://t.co/9LA6wECRml Tone-deafness of too many liberal intellectuals never ceases to amaze, to pt where I should cease to be amazed. This is a prime example: smug, self-righteous, and worst, profoundly self-serving, no matter good intentions. Leaving US is a luxury for a few.

Yep. I wrote about Trump & royalism at Civic Fields a few weeks back: https://t.co/x3xRVxuJfj Still, I am sobered by way in which royalism can morph into authoritarianism (i.e. absolutism) rather quickly if certain guardrails fall off. I worry about congressional complicity.

The capacity for self-reflective critical thinking is what stands between humanity and the descent into a new form of totalitarianism AI is technological ideology. It strips you of the right to think for yourself while turning you back against yourself in isolation. It's inhuman

Took some time to step back from all the fury and think about freedom, what its all about (turns out, it's not about cars): https://t.co/PO1kldxqFi

Note that David Brooks is calling for a mass uprising. David Brooks. https://t.co/4xFXp5GpiH

As some of you know, I have been newslettering on behalf of civic health. Here's my latest: https://t.co/3AHuFh0iuU

"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty." — Hannah Arendt

I wrote about Kevin Durant and Robert Putnam this week: https://t.co/rHUYgLfNhJ

https://t.co/D3jbeLrbES

I am not much on X, but for those interested, I am launching "Civic Fields." It is meant to be an outpost on the internet that tries to pull attention from the news cycle to more basic questions about political and civic life. This week's post:

And yet, progressive staff 100% ok with their candidate sitting side-by-side with Liz Cheney. I know that this is the point of the post here, but it really does say a quite a bit about the professional progressive political class that they are ok with Cheney but not Rogin.

Really, if Donald Trump is fit to be President of the United States then surely Matt Gaetz is qualified to be Attorney General, Tulsi Gabbard ready for Director of National Intelligence, and Fox News suited to run the Pentagon, no?

This is great. I write about this in "Politics for Everybody: Reading Hannah Arendt in Uncertain Times." For rhetoricians out there, or for more rhetorically minded teachers & citizens, Arendt is offering us a practical philosophy of rhetoric superior to anything in K. Burke

"I will easily admit that public peace is a great good. However, I do not want to forget that it is by way of good order that all peoples have arrived at tyranny. It does not follow, assuredly, that people should scorn public peace. But it must not suffice for them." -Tocqueville

"A private individual who fears the laws that threaten him can be without morals and even in spite of himself, a good [enough] citizen; but a prince [or president] without morals is always a monster." - Montesquieu, _Pensées_