Trump depends upon the opposing media he seeks to exclude. Its opposition generates the conflict through which his political identity acquires force. The wizard needs the curtain, but he also needs someone on the other side insisting that we look behind it.
Political systems are historical constructions, not immutable necessities. Their persistence does not establish their continuing adequacy.
The student walkout against One Nation points to a larger problem: the affective politics of cultivated antagonism that has become disconcertingly effective as a technologically-mediated, commercially-leveraged narrative system.
At the limit lies bullshit: language sufficiently detached from external constraint that its capacity to provoke another cycle of response becomes more important than what it describes.
Political science inherits the person from philosophy without explaining it.
Culture survives because it changes. A culture that cannot change is not being preserved. It is being embalmed.
There is no final closure. No permanent certainty. No government that fixes everything forever. There are only systems that adapt well and systems that adapt badly.
The task is not to create perfect agreement, but to maintain enough shared coherence that a society can continue solving problems without tearing itself apart.
The Reflecting Pool turned green. Perhaps it is simply doing its job.
The appeal of populism is that it makes complexity feel unnecessary. The cost is usually discovered much later.
Populists tell you they’re going to smash the system for your benefit. Funny how it still always seems to end with the rich getting richer, the government getting worse, and everyone else paying for the repairs.
Australia’s political speed-dating with One Nation suggests that what has happened in the USA is not an exception, it is a franchised political method.
