Stew. I get 50 emails daily, most of the substacks, yours is the only one I thoroughly read and absorb. I can't say that I learn from you, but I can say that you re order my thinking. Always another way to look at something, to see what has always been there, but not seeable because of blinders.
I might find use to plagarize you, with credit, for this as it is my bitch, the big wheels in the Democratic Party should read this: Freakin' boring accountants, how right you are.
Political parties are never monoliths. They’re like families with feuding, fragility, and bound by shared illusions. America’s two big ones are no exception. Ours don’t splinter as easily as in other countries, but they shift over time, swallowing new coalitions and shedding old ones.
In the last half century, we came close to something this country had only dreamed about: a truly multiracial democracy. Not perfect, of course, but real enough to frighten the ghosts of the old order. Civil rights cracked open the imagination of America, and with it came a double-edged energy, a politics of progress, and a politics of backlash.
One party learned to ride that backlash like a wave while speaking in simpler slogans, addressing older fears, and promising a mythic past. The other tried to keep its balance, talking like accountants while the world demanded prophets. Each carried its own contradictions, its own debts to the century that made them.
Stew. I get 50 emails daily, most of the substacks, yours is the only one I thoroughly read and absorb. I can't say that I learn from you, but I can say that you re order my thinking. Always another way to look at something, to see what has always been there, but not seeable because of blinders.
I might find use to plagarize you, with credit, for this as it is my bitch, the big wheels in the Democratic Party should read this: Freakin' boring accountants, how right you are.
Political parties are never monoliths. They’re like families with feuding, fragility, and bound by shared illusions. America’s two big ones are no exception. Ours don’t splinter as easily as in other countries, but they shift over time, swallowing new coalitions and shedding old ones.
In the last half century, we came close to something this country had only dreamed about: a truly multiracial democracy. Not perfect, of course, but real enough to frighten the ghosts of the old order. Civil rights cracked open the imagination of America, and with it came a double-edged energy, a politics of progress, and a politics of backlash.
One party learned to ride that backlash like a wave while speaking in simpler slogans, addressing older fears, and promising a mythic past. The other tried to keep its balance, talking like accountants while the world demanded prophets. Each carried its own contradictions, its own debts to the century that made them.