Thirteen years ago, and several years before Trump became president, your editor wrote a piece about recovering from the sad condition of our republic. Here is one of a number of excerpts we will be running.
Face the facts -The First American Republic is over. The Constitution is being trashed by both major parties. We are incapable of responding to the environmental crisis. Liberals can't tell the difference between being elite and being extinct. We're in the most expensive wars of no purpose in our history. Both major parties have moved steadily to the right over the past thirty years. Both have never been so corrupt. Ethnic prejudice is at an overt level unseen since the days of the civil rights struggles. The economy is still in the pits. Thanks to Citizens United, money has replaced votes as dominant political campaign objective. Our creative culture has been reduced to the likes of Lady Gaga, Desperate Houswives, the Kardashians and Jersey Shore. And Barack Obama has turned out to be the Bernie Madoff of the Democratic Party - successfully conning America's liberals out of their hope and spare change.
Work around it - If a hurricane comes to your neighborhood, you don't just sit around the kitchen table complaining about it; you do things to help your survival. The same is true of the great storm of American disintegration. We have clearly lost what we have lost. We can give up our futile efforts to preserve the illusion and turn our energies instead to the construction of a new time. It is this willingness to walk away from the seductive power of the present that first divides the mere reformer from the rebel -- the courage to emigrate from one's own ways in order to meet the future not as an entitlement but as a frontier.
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