Posted on 01/10/2025 2:33:00 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
There’s an old idea about science fiction that I’ve always loved: It aims to create cognitive estrangement, to make the familiar seem unfamiliar, so it can be looked at anew.
But sometimes the opposite is needed: We need to make the unfamiliar into the familiar, to see what is old in what feels new.
This can be a challenge with Donald Trump. He can appear as a hurricane of strangeness. It was a liberal rallying cry in his first term: Don’t normalize him. Remember, this is abnormal.
In a way, it’s no less true in his second term: An antivax conspiracy theorist for Health and Human Services secretary? That’s abnormal. A former “Fox & Friends” host for defense secretary? Abnormal. An underqualified hatchet man who has vowed to use the state to go after Trump’s enemies to lead the F.B.I. — and that the Senate would even consider him? Abnormal. Billionaire after billionaire trekking to the President-elect’s private club in Florida to curry favor with him? Abnormal.
Yet we also need to confront the reality that we have seen it all before. Sometimes here — but much more often elsewhere. Donald Trump is something old, not something new. We spend so much time talking about the rules he breaks — but we don’t spend much time detailing the rules he obeys.
America is undergoing a regime change. We think of that term as describing a change in who is in power, but I mean it in the sense of the political system itself — the way that power works.
We’re used to our politics revolving around what the political scientists call “programmatic political parties” — coalitions bound together by shared interests and goals. They feature agreements that supersede the desires of any particular leader. They have large collections of elites...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Only to the strange.
The Slimes proves every day their psychosis and lunacy. And worse, their Goebbels level propagandizing.
Ezra Klein was behind “Journolist” one of the early online attempts of leftist media to shape narratives together.
Get bent, Klein, you communist pufter!
Perhaps I’m just tired, but this reads like gobbledygook to me. I have no idea what he’s trying to say.
“I have no idea what he’s trying to say.”
Permit me:
1. Orange Man REALLY REALLY Bad.
2. Going to appoint himself King.
3. Has surrounded himself with unqualified boot lickers.
Thanks. I guess.
They’re trying really hard to paint him as strange and abnormal LOL
Correct. He can go jump in a lake.
Sanctimonious noise from a washed-up elitist bullshit artist.
Who are they trying to convince? Their fellow crazies? They forget that MOST of the country voted for and like President Trump.
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