Summary thoughts about this book.
Richardson tells the story of the past century, of the previous four years (before the book was published in 2019), and of the nation’s first century, in a matter-of-fact style that expresses not so much any kind of partisan position as it does the the development of conflicts between the founders, and those who’ve always opposed them, from first principles, as she, being a historian, understands them. Continue reading
Continuing my fairly detailed summary notes of this book. The second part of this book is about the ascendance of Trump, finishing with the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The third part of the looks back at the roots of America and wonders how we can now reclaim its ideals from the authoritarians and autocrats.
Part 2: The Authoritarian Experiment
Ch11, A Snapshot of America, p83
Trump announced his campaign for president on June 16, 2015. He came from reality TV, a show the producers thought was a joke, beginning in 2004. He was more image than substance. p84.7:
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Subtitled “Notes on the State of America”
(Viking, Sep 2023, xvii + 286pp, including 30p of notes and index)
Heather Cox Richardson is a historian who has become well-known, in addition to several earlier books, for her newsletter called Letters from an American, now on Substack. I don’t recall how I first heard of her, probably on Facebook, her Wikipedia entry suggests. (That entry notes that her newsletter is the most successful on Substack, bringing in $1 million/year. She’s the most prominent in a trend of influential thinkers to abandoned traditional media for independent subscription-based platforms, even though most of their content is free. Paul Krugman being the latest.)
This book takes a century-long view of America, explaining how we got to the point where someone like Trump could be elected president. It was published in 2023, and of course she continues to narrate history as it unfolds in her daily posts. Her style is straightforward and equanimous, matter-of-fact in describing the situation without seeming overly partisan. I started this book when it came out in late 2023, put it aside for some reason, and finished reading it last August. And now am finally writing it up here.
Well Mr. Trump? What about the price of those eggs? You were going to fix that, right?
Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 24 Jan 2025: Trumponomics is back: Tech-bros are delighted, but the price of eggs is soaring, subtitled “Trump thinks he won by talking about the economy — and now he gets to wreck it and enrich his billionaire pals”
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Evidence: his Cabinet picks.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 23 Jan 2025: Donald Trump’s war on DEI is not about “merit”, subtitled “Executive orders attacking DEI are about promoting unqualified white men over diverse candidates”
Title and subtitle pretty much say all, but it’s worth quoting Marcotte:
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Doing next to nothing, while the world burned.
OnlySky, Dale McGowan, 21 Jan 2025: The unforgiven generations, subtitled “We will be remembered for nothing else.”
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Following directly from previous post. What Trump did do on his first day in office was pardon some 1500 rioters (he called them hostages!!) who attacked the Capital in 2021. So much for the party of law and order (thought it’s not the first time).
NY Times, Opinion by the Editorial Board, 20 Jan 2025: Trump’s Opening Act of Contempt
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So this time I did watch Trump’s inauguration. Continue reading
From Facebook, a few days ago. The science fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson attempts to summarize the current condition in a single sentence.
Facebook, Robert Charles Wilson, 11 Jan 2025: via David Gerrold.
The concentration of wealth is driving novel communication technologies that are creating a tsunami of misinformation that enables the emergence of far-right political entities that further protect and capture wealth by gutting democratic governance and suppressing knowledge about climate and environmental emergencies through the devaluation of education and science at a time when artificial intelligence begins to transform the nature of war and competition for resources risks armed conflict between nuclear-armed nations no longer constrained by a liberal ideology of cooperation and human rights.
Inequality and oligarchs, check. Misinformation, check. Suppressing knowledge about climate change, check. AI, check. …
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NY Times, Opinion by Jamelle Bouie, 15 Jan 2025: You’ll Never Guess Who Trump’s New Favorite President Is
When was America great? What does MAGA want to go back to? Trump never says exactly.
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I find this piece interesting, but for reasons different than a concern about the immigration crisis.
NY Times, Opinion by The Editorial Board, 10 Jan 2025: A Big Idea to Solve America’s Immigration Mess
The problem is immigration, the board says, and the inability to regulate it. (But the real problem is something else, I would say.)
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