Those of us old enough to have lived through several decades of American politics cannot help but be thrown into a state of shock nearly every day observing the behavior of the second Trump administration. I’m not proud to admit this about myself. Journalists are supposed to be hard-nosed. Seasoned. We’ve seen it all. In my own case, I’ve also studied political history and the history of political ideas. I know the America I was raised in, during the 1970s and ’80s, and that persisted until the middle of the 2010s, with its stability, firmly entrenched norms of transferring power, and high-minded exhortations to better angels and common goods, was a historical outlier—something precious we needed to appreciate and make a conscious effort to preserve.
Yet on any given day within that period, we took it for granted. It was just the way we did things here. Like driving on the right-hand side of the road. Or filing taxes on April 15 every year.
Not anymore.
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